Learn Russian These lessons contain English translations.

Learning a language is not a secret. The experts will tell you that you need comprehensible input (e.g. lectures, texts, videos, podcasts), lesson review, practice opportunities and language reinforcement. The OpenLanguage Method puts these steps together to help save you time.

Your biggest challenge in learning a language will likely be maintaining your motivation to study. To start, we recommend learning some common expressions to achieve some early success. Seeing how you can use the new language to create new opportunities for yourself is the best motivator to continue studying. Afterwards, you can start to examine the common sentence patterns to provide insights into how to quickly expand your fluency with the language. Do not start by studying grammar tables, but instead focus on mimicking high-frequency language. OpenLanguage lessons are designed to help you learn this way. Browse some of the links below to get a sense for the language, then jump into the complimentary course to get started.

Introduction to the Russian Language

Russian is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe with 144 million speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. It is also unofficially, but widely spoken in Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Russian is the 8th most spoken language by number of native speakers, and 5th by total number of speakers. The language is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second-most used language on the internet behind English, but only the sixth most used on the top 1,000 sites. Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, which consists of 33 letters.

Links to get started with learning Russian: