🇷🇺 The best websites for learning Russian

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.