If you want to know how to learn Russian, the alphabet is the best place to start. The Russian alphabet is easy to learn because it's very phonetic. Russians use the “Cyrillic” alphabet, named after the Greek monk, St. Cyril.
If you are interested in learning the Russian language, the first thing to do to start learning the alphabet. Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet which is completely different than the Latin alphabet used in English and many other Indo-European languages.
Before learning how to read, write or speak Russian, you must first understand the Russian alphabet. This alphabet uses Cyrillic script and consists of 33 letters, some of which are the same as and some of which are different from the Roman alphabet.
Conclusion: You could learn basic Russian in a month, but it will be a realistic elementary “survival” level. For better improvement, it will take several months, depends on how often you will study during a week the ideal schedule the Centre students recommend is 1 hour lesson 2-3 times a week.
While total fluency will take years of practicing Russian and will likely require you to spend time in a Russian-speaking country, it's absolutely possible to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, plenty of Russian words, and the basics of Russian grammar in six months.
Does Duolingo teach Russian well? Duolingo offers a complete Russian course, but that doesn't mean it teaches the language well. If you're looking to pick up some useful words and phrases, it's a great option. If you want to become fluent in Russian though, Duolingo is not the best choice.
Those who know 1,000 to 3,000 words can carry on everyday conversations. Knowing 4,000 to 10,000 words makes people advanced language users while knowing more than 10,000 words puts them at the fluent or native-speaker levels.
If you're an absolute beginner, 6 weeks of intensive study will be enough. By intensive, we mean about 120 hours of studying. This figure may sound scary, but in fact it's only 20 hours per week for 1.5 months (or 2 hours per day for about 2 months).
Ukrainian and Belarusian are the closest languages, as together with Russian they form the East Slavic group of languages. These three languages have an 86% lexical similarity; that is, they share 86% of the same words.
If you want to say “Stop” in Russian, say: СТОП!
Duolingo Russian course (beginner level) includes 6500+ words and 8400+ sentences. It's aimed at helping you build basic conversation skills, supplement school classes, or prepare for business-level communication. You can easily sign up for a free Duolingo account and get started right away.
The grammar rules in Russian are very complex and have numerous exceptions. In addition, many learners struggle with the pronunciation – the stress in words is largely unpredictable and not marked in writing, while there are multiple homonyms.
The Foreign Service Institute has determined it takes around 1100 hours for native English speakers to reach fluency in Russian. If you spend 60 minutes per day studying Russian, it will take you 3 years. If you spend 6 hours per day, you will reach an upper intermediate level in half a year.
Since Russian is a global language with so many speakers, learning the language could be a great step for anyone's career. With many Russian-speaking nations experiencing economic upswings, knowing the language could be the key to striking the ideal business deal.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
After reading through all the differences, Russian probably comes across as the easier language to learn. And it is! For native English speakers, Russian is categorized as taking 44 weeks to learn (or 1,100 hours), while Japanese takes 88 weeks (2,200 hours).
Duolingo is still operating as a completely free app in Russia and Belarus. We believe that education is a human right.
We see this question a lot and the answer is: yes. Duolingo is a free language-learning platform, and every language and lesson is totally free!