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Resources

This site gets you to a solid A2. Here's what to add along the way, and where to go after.

Comprehensible input

Once you can read this site's phrases without sounding them out letter by letter, start adding audio and video where you understand most but not all of what's said. This is what actually builds listening speed and intuition — grammar tables won't do it alone.

  • Russian with Max — a YouTube channel aimed squarely at learners; slow, clear speech with explanations in English. Good starting point from week 1.
  • Easy Russian (YouTube/podcast) — street-interview format, real native speakers at natural-ish speed with subtitles in Russian and English. Start once you're comfortable with Cyrillic and basic vocabulary, roughly Phase 2 of the roadmap.
  • Comprehensible Russian (podcast/YouTube, Cody & Antonina) — graded storytelling designed specifically for learners, moving from beginner to intermediate. Good daily listening once you hit Phase 3.

Aim for material where you understand somewhere around 70–80%. Fully comprehensible is too easy to teach you anything new; fully incomprehensible just teaches you to tune out.

Graded readers

Short stories and simplified texts written (or adapted) for learners at your level, with controlled vocabulary. Look for anything labeled A1/A2 graded reader for Russian — they exist as both physical books and apps. Start these once you've cleared Phase 2 of the roadmap (all six cases introduced); reading fluently enough to enjoy a story is a good sign your case recognition is solidifying.

Reference grammar

This site teaches grammar in the order you need it, not as an exhaustive reference. Once you hit something this site doesn't cover in depth, or want more drill volume on one specific point, get a reference grammar in the style of Russian Grammar in Use (or A New Reference Grammar of Modern Russian for something more exhaustive) — a book you look things up in, not one you read cover to cover.

Anki vs. the built-in flashcards

This site ships with a flashcard app — use it daily, it's built around this site's exact phrase and grammar decks. Consider adding Anki once you outgrow the built-in decks (roughly Phase 3 onward): Anki's spaced-repetition algorithm is more tunable, and you can pull in community decks for vocabulary this site doesn't cover (food, professions, idioms). Don't run both systems for the same material — pick one per deck so you're not reviewing the same word twice a day in two different apps.

Tutoring

Grammar drills and comprehensible input get you a long way, but nothing replaces a real conversation with real-time correction. italki is the standard starting point — book a conversational tutor (not necessarily a formal "teacher") once you can hold a five-minute conversation about yourself, roughly the Phase 4 self-check on the roadmap. Weekly 30-minute sessions are enough to start; the goal is output practice and correction, not new material.

Free courses

If you want structured instruction alongside self-study, university-affiliated free courses (Russian as a Foreign Language programs from Russian universities, often on Coursera or their own platforms) are worth a look once you've finished this site's grammar sequence — they'll feel like review with useful extra depth rather than a firehose.

Keep using Duolingo — as vocabulary review only

Duolingo got you this far, but it teaches by pattern-matching, not by explaining the case system — which is why you're here. Don't drop it, but change its job: use it for vocabulary review and streak-maintenance, not as your source of new grammar. If a Duolingo sentence uses a case ending you don't recognize, that's your cue to go check the matching grammar lesson, not to just accept the sentence as memorized text.

What B1 adds after this site

This site stops at a deliberately scoped A2: six cases, both aspects, present/past/future, and the barest introduction to verbs of motion. B1 adds:

  • Verbs of motion with prefixes — this site's intro lesson covers идти́/ходи́ть and е́хать/е́здить unprefixed. B1 Russian runs on prefixed forms built from these roots (прийти́, уйти́, вы́йти, подойти́, дое́хать...) — a whole productive system of directional prefixes stacked on a small set of motion verbs.
  • Participles and verbal adverbs (причастия, деепричастия) — the "-ing" and "having done" forms that let you build the complex, embedded sentences you'll see in real writing and formal speech, instead of always chaining short clauses with и and когда́.

Both are substantial topics in their own right — treat finishing this site's roadmap as the finish line for A2 and the honest start line for B1, not a detour on the way there.