🇷🇺 Cómo aprender ruso Русский

Max is a certified RKI teacher with 400+ videos, and the format is the classic comprehensible-input recipe: he speaks slowly, articulates carefully, and paraphrases difficult vocabulary in simpler Russian rather than switching to English. Topics range over Russian culture, travel and daily life. Videos and podcast episodes are free; PDF transcripts, vocabulary lists and lessons are paid. Starts to make sense around A2 and stays useful well into B2.

Nearly 300 episodes since 2018 and still publishing — walking podcasts, interviews and monologues delivered at a natural but unhurried pace, entirely in Russian. Artem is himself a polyglot, so a lot of episodes are about language learning, which keeps the vocabulary relevant to you. Free on podcast apps and YouTube; transcripts, courses and the club are paid. Noticeably faster than Russian with Max — treat it as the next step up.

One of the biggest Russian-learning channels, strongest on the pain points English speakers hit early: cases, verbs of motion, aspect, and word order. Explanations are in English with Russian examples, which makes it usable from A1 unlike the immersion channels. Free on YouTube; the BeFluent platform, camp and live calls are a paid subscription. The delivery is high-energy and salesy — fine if you like that, grating if you don't.

A certified teacher of fifteen years who runs lessons almost entirely in Russian, dropping into English only to unpack a hard phrase. Clearly narrated listening exercises, folk tales and grammar walk-throughs make it a good bridge between English-language explainer channels and full immersion. Free on YouTube, with paid lessons and materials available. Best from about A2 once you know the case endings by sight.

Daria holds a philology degree and an RKI teaching certificate and teaches Russian at university level, and the site reflects that: sequenced grammar explanations, free lessons and downloadable materials alongside paid courses. It's the most 'course-shaped' of the independent Russian sites, useful if you want a syllabus rather than a feed. Marketing is fairly heavy, and the best free material is the podcast (listed separately).

Daria reads and discusses everyday topics, Russian traditions and culture at reduced speed, then works through the key vocabulary — one of very few Russian podcasts genuinely usable below B1. Over 10 million downloads and a long back catalogue you can work through in order. Episodes are free; transcripts and extended materials sit behind her paid offerings.

Built around the slang and idioms you actually hear from friends, in films and on the street — the layer textbooks skip entirely. Every episode is recorded by a native speaker at normal conversational pace and comes with a full Russian transcript marked with stress plus an English translation, all free. Deliberately advanced: if you can't yet follow unslowed Russian, bank it for later.

Dr Curtis Ford answers exactly one question per video — this case ending, that verb pair, this stress shift — in a calm, low-stress classroom manner. The organisation is the selling point: when you're stuck on instrumental after 'с' or on unidirectional verbs of motion, there's a three-minute video for precisely that. Entirely free with no upsell on the channel. It's a reference, not a course, so pair it with a textbook.

The Russian member of the Innovative Language 101 family: hundreds of short lessons arranged into level pathways, each with a dialogue, breakdown and PDF, plus a word-of-the-day and flashcard system. Its strength is sheer coverage of everyday situations. Quality is uneven across series, the marketing email volume is notorious, and most content requires a subscription after the free trial lessons.

The Russian branch of Easy Languages: unscripted conversations filmed on the street, subtitled in both Russian and English so you can watch the same clip at very different levels. The 'Super Easy Russian' series slows everything down for near-beginners. Videos are free; membership adds transcripts and exercises. Publishing is slower than the bigger Easy channels — roughly a couple of videos a month.

Two native hosts who left Russia in 2022 discuss language, culture and emigration in natural, unscripted Russian — closer to real conversation than any graded podcast. Free to listen; the membership adds interactive transcripts and a vocabulary helper that translates as you listen. The unscripted pace makes it B1+ material, and the emigration angle means politics surfaces regularly.

Nikita builds meaning from drawings, gestures and context rather than translation, which makes his videos among the very few that work for Russian from near-zero. Subtitles and on-screen support are included, and the sequencing takes you from the first hundred words up through pre-intermediate. Free on YouTube; premium videos and private lessons are paid. Volume is still modest compared with Spanish CI channels.

Mark Thomson's beginner course drips new words in through repeated contextual examples so you infer meaning rather than translate, and it introduces the case system gently instead of dumping six tables on you. Episodes, notes and extra practice audio are all free on the site — one of the best zero-cost starting points for Russian. It stops at a solid A1/A2, so you'll need a follow-on course afterwards.

Tania's rule from the start was that nothing is ever explained in English — a difficult word is explained with simpler Russian, which trains you to stay inside the language. Episodes open with a short dialogue and then unpack it, and the archive is sorted by level so you can find material that fits. A large set of episodes is free; full transcripts, exercises and the club are paid.

Made primarily as course material for university students, which shows in the systematic coverage: alphabet and pronunciation, case by case, and themed vocabulary sets for food, shopping and transport. Because they were built as homework, the videos work equally well alone, with a tutor, or as classroom supplements. Free with no paywall; production is plain and there's no accompanying exercise platform.

Kristina Malidovskaya's site pairs a YouTube channel of learning tips with something rarer: free Russian texts that come with both a translation and an audio narration, plus paid graded readers for structured extensive reading. Extensive reading is badly underserved in Russian, which makes this genuinely useful at A2–B1. The free library is finite — expect to move to the paid readers if you like the format.

The alphabet section is the reason to bookmark it — how to pronounce, type and handwrite all 33 Cyrillic letters, which is the first two hours of anyone's Russian and often the worst-served. Beyond that there are grammar topics with tests, word-of-the-day lists and declension tables. Completely free and ad-supported; the design is firmly from an earlier internet era and some outbound links are stale.

Structured like an actual introductory syllabus: an introductory phonetics and alphabet course first, then grammar lessons with audio, interactive exercises and immediate-feedback quizzes. That ordering matters in Russian, where getting the sound-to-letter mapping wrong early is expensive to undo. All free. It stops well short of intermediate and the site looks dated, but nothing else free covers the first steps this carefully.

A straightforward free course site: numbered lessons with recorded audio, a solid alphabet-and-pronunciation introduction, verb conjugation notes and topic word lists. Useful as a second explanation when another source's presentation of the cases hasn't clicked. No account or payment needed; it hasn't changed much in years, so treat it as a stable reference rather than an active community.

The dictionary most Russian learners end up living in: every entry shows the stress, the complete declension or conjugation table with accented forms, audio, and examples drawn from a 350,000-sentence bank. Stress marking alone justifies it, since printed Russian omits them. Free, open data under CC BY-SA, with apps available. Coverage of rare or very new words is thinner than a commercial dictionary's.

Bundles the normative dictionaries (explanatory, orthographic, stress), the full spelling and punctuation rules, and a long-running expert help desk answering usage questions. This is where you settle arguments about commas, declining foreign names, or which stress is correct. Free and enormous. Everything is in Russian and written for native professionals, so it is only workable from around B2.

The academic corpus of Russian, searchable by word form, lemma, grammatical feature and collocation across literary, spoken and journalistic subcorpora. When a dictionary tells you two prepositions are both possible, this tells you which one Russians actually write. Free to use. The query interface is built for linguists and the results are raw citations — expect a learning curve, and it answers usage questions rather than teaching.

Video lecture courses, podcasts, articles and quizzes on culture and the humanities, produced to a very high standard by working academics. For advanced learners it is the ideal step past learner material: you're studying something real, in Russian, with vocabulary that repeats across a whole course. Much of the site is free; Radio Arzamas and some series need a subscription. No learner scaffolding at all.

Kids' animation is the standard back door into a language's native media, and Smeshariki is the best-loved Russian example: self-contained 6-minute episodes, clear articulation, everyday vocabulary and enough wit that adults don't suffer. Hundreds of episodes are free on the official channel. Speech is still native-speed and subtitles are not guaranteed, so it lands around A2–B1 rather than absolute beginner — turn on auto-captions if you need them.

Six modules spanning A1 to C2 from the state institute that specialises in teaching Russian as a foreign language, covering all four skills plus pronunciation practice, free after registration and with an internal level certificate at the end. The breadth is unmatched among free courses. The platform is dated and largely Russian-interfaced, and support is minimal — it rewards self-disciplined learners.

TORFL (ТРКИ in Russian) is the state-recognised proficiency test, needed for Russian university admission (B1/B2) and various residency purposes; the six levels run ТЭУ and ТБУ through ТРКИ-IV. This is the testing centre page of the Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, one of the accredited administering bodies, with session dates and registration details. It is in Russian and covers the Moscow centre — fees and availability elsewhere vary, so check your local accredited centre before planning around it.

Robin, Evans-Romaine and Shatalina's course is what most US degree programmes teach from, and it balances communicative tasks with the structural drilling Russian actually requires. Two volumes take you to roughly CEFR A2/B1 over two academic years, with audio and a companion workbook. It's a classroom book: expensive, and the pacing assumes a teacher and classmates, so solo learners should pair it with the workbook and a tutor.

Nicholas Brown's course has been the self-teacher's standby for decades because the explanations are unusually clear and jargon-free, with generous examples and revision exercises. It's cheap and covers a lot of ground. The catch is that there is no audio in the book, the vocabulary lists are long, and the presentation is austere — pair it with a listening resource, and don't start here if you need encouragement to keep going.

Smyth and Murray's Routledge workbook pairs a short, precise explanation of each grammar point with drills you can mark yourself, which makes it the practical complement to a discursive textbook. Good for hammering the cases and aspect until they're automatic. There's a companion Intermediate volume for the next stage. It's exercises, not conversation — no audio and no communicative work.

Olly Richards' graded reader for Russian solves the gap between textbook dialogues and real books, which is especially wide in Russian: controlled vocabulary, per-chapter word lists, plot summaries and comprehension questions so you can read without stopping every line. Good for building reading stamina at A2–B1. The language is deliberately simplified — it prepares you for real Russian prose rather than being it.

The main English-language hub for Russian learners: case and aspect questions get thorough answers from natives and advanced learners, handwriting and translation help is routine, and the resource threads are well-curated. Search first — the frequent beginner questions already have excellent long answers. As with any forum, answers vary in quality and prescriptivism, so cross-check anything surprising against Gramota.

Free on desktop, Android and web; the iOS app is a one-off paid purchase that funds the project. The interface is dated and the options are overwhelming at first, but nothing beats it for retaining vocabulary over years. Most effective when you stop grinding premade decks and start mining sentences from things you actually read or watch.

One-on-one video lessons from roughly $5–30/hr depending on the language and the teacher's credentials. It is the single fastest way to get real speaking practice, and the reason most self-study plans stall is that they skip this step. Community tutors are cheap conversation partners; professional teachers are worth it if you want structure, homework and error correction.

The free tier is genuinely usable (ads plus a limited 'hearts' system); Super removes both for about $96/yr. Its real value is streak-driven consistency for absolute beginners, and the smaller courses are thin machine-assisted content rather than the polished Spanish or French trees. Treat it as a warm-up habit, not a curriculum — nobody reaches conversational fluency on Duolingo alone.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

Import podcasts, articles or ebooks, tap unknown words for definitions, and LingQ tracks your known-word count over time. The free tier caps how many saved words you can keep, so serious use means paying (~$13/month or less annually). The interface is clunky and the built-in SRS is weaker than Anki, but the reading-plus-audio workflow with 50+ languages is hard to replicate elsewhere.

The 'learn with locals' video clips are the distinguishing feature — you hear real people at real speed rather than TTS. Be aware that Memrise moved user-created community courses off the main app in 2024 onto a separate site, which gutted what many long-time users valued most, and the app has leaned hard into AI chat features since. Fine as a phrase-and-vocabulary app for major languages; if you came for the community decks, use Anki instead.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Built on Tatoeba sentences, it drills words in context by frequency band across 50+ languages and 170+ language pairings, with a genuinely generous free tier. It explicitly starts where beginner apps end, so it is the natural 'what now?' answer for someone who finished a Duolingo tree. Sentences are crowd-sourced and occasionally awkward or oddly specific, and it teaches nothing about grammar explicitly.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

Built-in correction tools let partners fix your messages inline, and the social 'moments' feed gets you corrections from strangers without arranging a call. Free for the core exchange; VIP adds more translations and simultaneous target languages. The persistent caveat is that a fair share of users treat it as a dating app, and exchange partners are unreliable — it works best once you already have some output to correct.

Same idea as HelloTalk but with vetted profiles and a cleaner focus on actual voice and video calls, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Free to use; Pro adds unlimited partner search and extra languages, and the app also sells paid tutors. Both apps live or die on finding one or two committed partners, so expect to message a lot of people before anything sticks.

100,000+ tutors across 120+ subjects, with a free replacement if your first tutor is a bad fit. The main structural difference from italki is that Preply pushes weekly lesson subscriptions and takes a large commission from tutors, which some learners consider a reason to prefer italki. Worth comparing side by side for your language — prices, availability and tutor quality differ per market rather than per platform.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit: you shadow native audio, record your own version, and a real human coach returns feedback — 10 free submissions a month, unlimited for about $20/month, with full scholarships for anyone who needs one. Covers French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and English. It only fixes pronunciation and delivery, so it complements rather than replaces conversation practice.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

A Chrome extension that shows target-language and native subtitles simultaneously, lets you click any word for a definition, replay a line, and save phrases for review. The free tier already covers dual subs, dictionary lookups and the CEFR-graded video catalogue; Pro (about $6/month) adds machine translation, speech recognition and better AI lookups. It transforms passive Netflix time into study time, but you need enough of a base — roughly B1 — for subtitle mining to beat just watching.

The heavyweight immersion toolkit: one-click sentence mining with audio, screenshot and definitions, plus its own SRS and known-word tracking, for 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and the major European ones. A 10-day free trial then a subscription (roughly $10/month). Overkill unless you are committed to a sentence-mining routine — if that describes you it saves hours a week, otherwise Language Reactor's free tier is enough.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

A franchise of local producers filming unscripted street interviews, each episode subtitled in the target language and English, which is the closest free thing to hearing how people genuinely speak. All YouTube episodes are free; membership adds transcripts, vocabulary lists and exercises. Real-speed unscripted speech is hard early on — start with the slower 'Super Easy' episodes if you are below B1.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

The default place to ask 'is X app worth it' or 'what should I do at B1' and get answers from people who have actually done it, plus per-language subreddits (r/Spanish, r/LearnJapanese, r/French) with far better resource lists. The wiki and FAQ head off most beginner questions. Expect strong ideological camps — comprehensible-input purists versus textbook people — so read a few threads before taking any single answer as settled.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.

Modern assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will roleplay a scenario at your level, correct your writing with explanations, generate graded reading, and hold voice conversations — endlessly patient and available at 2am, which no tutor is. Free tiers are enough for text practice; voice modes generally need a subscription. The caveats are real: models are noticeably weaker and more error-prone in lower-resource languages, they tend to produce bland textbook register rather than how people actually speak, and they will not correct you unless you explicitly ask them to.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

A streaming service where every show has clickable dual subtitles and saved words become flashcards, covering 15 languages with apps on phone, Roku and TV. It solves the 'what do I watch' problem for languages where Netflix's catalogue is thin. The library is much smaller than a mainstream streamer and it is subscription-only — if you already pay for Netflix, Language Reactor's free tier does most of the same job.

Thousands of public-domain books recorded by volunteers, downloadable as MP3 or M4B with no account. Pairing a LibriVox recording with the matching free Project Gutenberg text gives you a full audiobook-plus-ebook study set for nothing. Two caveats: recordings are volunteer-quality and vary a lot reader to reader, and everything is out of copyright, so the language is often a century old — great for literature, poor for modern slang.

Unlike most apps it is built around producing speech: you repeat, roleplay and converse with an AI tutor that gives pronunciation and phrasing feedback in real time. Covers Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian and Chinese for English speakers, with a 7-day trial then a subscription (roughly $20/month or $99/yr). Good for overcoming the fear of speaking before your first human lesson, but an AI will not push back or drift off-script the way a real conversation partner does.