Learn Russian for Travel, Work and Study

Cyrillic repays a weekend. Several letters look and sound as in English (а, к, м, о, т), several look familiar and sound different (в is v, н is n, р is r, с is s, у is u, х is kh), and the rest are new shapes for sounds English mostly has — ж for zh, ш for sh, ч for ch, ю for yu. Two letters have no sound at all: the soft sign ь softens the consonant before it, and the hard sign ъ keeps one hard. The one thing the alphabet does not tell you is stress, and in Russian stress decides both the sound of the vowels — an unstressed “o” is pronounced like “a” — and sometimes the meaning: “zámok” is a castle, “zamók” a lock.

The grammar is the Slavic one in full. Six cases put endings on nouns, adjectives, pronouns and names, so the order of words is free and used for emphasis. Nearly every verb comes in a pair, one for an action in progress or repeated, one for an action completed, and choosing between them is the grammatical decision Russian speakers make most often. Going somewhere has its own vocabulary: on foot or by transport, one direction or there and back, each a separate verb. Against all this stand real simplifications — no articles, no present tense of “to be”, only three tenses — and a spelling that, once stress is known, is largely predictable.

Russian distinguishes “ty”, for family, friends, children and God, from “vy”, for everyone else and for any group. Adults who have just met use “vy” and may stay on it for years; the move to “ty” is proposed, not assumed, usually by the older person or the woman. Formal address uses the first name and the patronymic — Ivan Petrovich, Anna Sergeyevna — rather than a title and surname, and a foreigner who learns a colleague's patronymic has learned the most respectful thing Russian offers.

Standard Russian is unusually uniform for a language of its size. Moscow and Vladivostok speak the same Russian with trivial differences of accent, and television has smoothed the regions further, so a learner never faces a dialect problem. Outside Russia the language is spoken as a first or second language across Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and much of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and by large communities in Israel, Germany, the Baltic states and North America. Its closest relatives, Ukrainian and Belarusian, are separate languages that a Russian speaker half-understands and should not assume to be Russian.

For an English speaker Russian is a long project. The US Foreign Service Institute's estimate is around 1,100 classroom hours before an English speaker works comfortably in it — the same group as Polish, Finnish and Hindi — and the hours go to the cases, the verb pairs and a vocabulary with few cognates. The shape of the curve is distinctive: a fast first month, as the alphabet opens and a few hundred words arrive, then a long plateau while the endings become automatic, then steady progress once reading becomes possible. Russians speak quickly and reduce their unstressed vowels, so understanding lags behind speaking for a long time.

In Moscow and St Petersburg a visitor manages in English at hotels, in museums and with younger people; the metro and the railways are signed in Latin letters as well as Cyrillic. Beyond the two capitals, and in daily life everywhere — shops, pharmacies, taxis, any official window — Russian is the only language, and that is true across Central Asia and much of the Caucasus too, where Russian rather than English is the second language a visitor can rely on. Russian companies, hospitals, courts and universities work in Russian; a handful of international firms and English-taught master's programmes do not. Foreign students bound for a Russian-taught degree spend a preparatory year on the language first.

• “Na zdorovye” is not cheers: Despite every film, Russians do not toast with it; it means “you're welcome” after a meal. A toast is “za vas!”, to you, or “za zdorovye!”, to health, and comes with a few words from the person proposing it.
• Two blues: Russian has no single word for blue: “siniy” is dark blue and “goluboy” light blue, and Russian speakers see them as different colours the way English speakers see red and pink.
• Yes no maybe: “Da net, navernoye” — literally “yes no, probably” — means “probably not”, and Russians use it daily without noticing the contradiction.
• The patronymic: Every Russian has a middle name made from their father's first name: Ivan's son is Ivanovich, his daughter Ivanovna. First name plus patronymic is the respectful address at work; the surname is for forms.
• Cursive is a different alphabet: Handwritten Russian turns т, ш, и and л into near-identical loops, and the word “lishishsya” in cursive is a famous row of twelve humps. Russians read it without blinking.
• A shop is a magazine: “Magazin” is a shop, “familiya” is a surname, “artist” is any performer, and “intelligentny” means cultured, not clever. Russian borrowed from French and kept the older meanings.
• Counting changes the noun: One “chas” (hour), two “chasa”, five “chasov”: the number decides the ending, and the rule resets at twenty-one. Learners count on their fingers for a year.

Russian has a state certificate system aligned to the CEFR: the TORFL, Test of Russian as a Foreign Language, known in Russian by the initials TRKI. It runs from the Elementary level (A1) and Basic level (A2) through four numbered certificates, TORFL-I (B1) to TORFL-IV (C2), each testing vocabulary and grammar, reading, listening, writing and speaking in five parts. The tests are set by a consortium of Russian universities under the education ministry and sat at their centres in Russia and at partner institutions abroad; the certificate does not expire. TORFL-I is the level a Russian-taught bachelor's degree asks for, TORFL-II the usual requirement for a master's or for professional registration, and the preparatory year at a Russian university is built to carry a beginner to the first of them.

Residence in Russia has a test of its own. A foreigner applying for a work permit, a temporary or permanent residence permit or citizenship sits a state examination in three parts — Russian language, Russian history and the basics of Russian law — with the language part set at an elementary level for work permits and at a basic, A2-like level for residence and citizenship, from which graduates of Russian-language schools and universities are exempt. Outside Russia, TORFL certificates serve as proof of Russian for universities in Kazakhstan and Belarus and for employers across the former Soviet space. With regular classes, most adults reach the Basic level within a year; TORFL-I usually takes a second year.

Two things a Russian learner's tools must do: show the stress on every word, because nothing else will, and give the full set of endings, because the form in the dictionary is only one of a dozen. Both are solved for free online, and flashcards that carry the stress mark on every noun and the partner of every verb do the rest. For listening, the gentlest entry is Russian made for learners — slow, subtitled, about ordinary life — before the news and the films, where the reduced vowels and the speed arrive together.

A tutor's chief gift in Russian is to catch the stress and the soft consonants in your own speech — “byt” and “byt'”, to be and daily life, differ only in a softened t that no learner hears unaided — and to make the case endings arrive in conversation at the speed Russians use them. A good tutor also teaches the register the textbooks avoid: when “vy” is a wall and when it is a courtesy, and how a patronymic is used in a meeting.