How to Learn Russian Successfully - A Roadmap

Hey guys, it's Mike again. Just a real brief reintroduction. I've been studying Russian now for five or six years and I would say, although I'm not completely fluent, I'm very near fluent in Russian. And I wanted to record this video because one of the most frequent questions I hear is from beginners is, how do I go about studying Russian? What do I do first? What do I do next? What's the progression of things that I study? And so I wanted to address that in this video and hopefully I can help out a lot of people because I don't typically see this as something that's widely shared or even widely known because, again, people are asking it all the time. How do I learn Russian? What do I do? Where do I start? And so forth. So I just want to preface these comments by saying that, in my experience, learning grammar and getting a teacher are two important aspects. But I also want to acknowledge that people have very different goals in what they want to accomplish when they're learning Russian and that's one of the very first steps. You want to define what your goal is. If you're going to go to Russia and be immersed in the language, then you can pretty much forget most of what I'm saying here because it's not obligatory that you even learn grammar. If you're going to be hearing Russian on a daily basis where you can just repeat after native Russian speakers and because that's how they acquire the language and it certainly works, obviously, because that's how it's done when you grow up in a Russian-speaking country However, if you're not so fortunate as to be in a Russian-speaking environment and you're either learning on your own or you're just learning at home over time, maybe you have a full-time job and you can't dedicate all your time to learning Russian, hopefully you'll find some of these comments useful. And in terms of when you hire a teacher, that's up to you. It varies based upon your goals and the way that you learn. You can probably learn Russian almost fully on your own. However, it's going to take longer and be more difficult that way. And again, back to this question of grammar, it's a perennial question that pops up over and over again. Do you really need to learn grammar? And I would say, again, that goes back to your personal goal. If you want to speak Russian correctly, using the correct conjugations and the correct declinations with the correct case usages and endings of words and so forth, and be able to create new concepts and new sentences and things like that, then grammar, I think, at least at some stage, becomes very important. You can go a long way. I think this has been proven without learning much grammar at all or without really even being concerned with it. But you will sound a little bit strange. You just have to come to terms with that. But if you want to sound as natural as possible, then I believe it's important that you learn grammar, or at least some of it, along the way. Now, it's important also, I would say, not to cram a whole bunch of stuff. You can certainly make flashcards and review lists of words and phrases and things like that. But in my opinion, it's just not much fun to just cram a whole bunch of stuff and try to force yourself to memorize things. So that's another thing to remember. Fun, I think, should be part of the process, because otherwise it's going to be very tempting to quit along the way if you're not enjoying yourself. So this is what I've called my roadmap to successfully learning Russian from zero to fluency. And I stole that phrase from zero to fluency from Daria Molchanova, who has her own channel and series called Russian from Zero to Fluency. And I would strongly recommend you guys check that out, especially if you're beginning Russian. And it will take you through a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about, though definitely not everything. So again, let's get started. Define your goal. What level of Russian do you want to acquire? What are you going to be using it for? Do you want to be able to read the Russian classics, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, etc., etc.? Watch modern Russian news and movies. Talk to your Russian friends or loved ones. A lot of people are interested in Russian because maybe their wife or their husband speaks Russian. Or possibly even use Russian in a professional setting, at work, for example. Or just be able to find some new and interesting work to do using the Russian that you've acquired. I would advise that you pace yourself accordingly. So again, it's important not to set unreasonable expectations. It's very easy to get to a place, as I did on multiple occasions, where I wanted to quit because it was just, it was very difficult. And I think it's important to just respect the language and pace yourself along the way. Second step, after you've sort of defined what your goals are, is to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. So that way you'll be able to do some basic reading, make out what words sort of sound like, although you won't really ever know what they sound like until you've heard them and practiced them. Actually learning the Cyrillic alphabet is really straightforward. It might take you, some people might take 30 minutes. It could take an hour or if you just kind of do it casually, maybe a couple hours or even up to a few days. Also you want to familiarize yourself with the version of Russian in cursive letters and decide for yourself whether you just want to learn to read Russian cursive, which I think is all that's necessary, or whether you also want to be able to write in Russian cursive. So knowing that writing something out in a notebook, many people have advised that, can be extremely helpful in remembering vocabulary and phrases and things like that. It probably would be very useful, although I decided early on that I wasn't going to mess with it because I'm always typing on a So yes, I type in Russian, but I do not write in print or cursive in Russian because I just don't see the need to do so. I do think that typing helps me remember, but I'm pretty sure that actually learning to write will help you to remember. However, be aware that Russian cursive looks very different than Russian print or type. So you'll have to give yourself extra time if you decide you're going to learn not only to read Russian in cursive, which is necessary, not only for reading handwriting, but also because when something is in print, if it's put into italics, then it will actually be in Russian cursive characters. And so you'll have to learn how to read them, although they look very, very different from the printed letters. So at least dedicate yourself to learning how to read it. If you decide you want also to learn how to write Russian cursive, give yourself a lot of extra time in this part of the process because you're going to need it. Next, listen to and learn basic greetings and very basic dialogues in Russian. And all those kinds of basic things that form dialogues. Learn how to say, you know, all the greetings, how old you are. Like he's five years, I have a brother and he's five years older than I am. Just some of those very basic constructions. And don't worry about grammar at this stage at all. Just get yourself, get your feet wet, so to speak, and start getting used to the basic sounds of the language and learn a lot of the words that you hear over and over and over again. Next, practice basic phrases and pronunciation via attentive listening repetition and shadowing. So shadowing is actually repeating both the sounds that you hear from a native speaker, as well as the emotion and intonation including in that. There's a lot of different ways to do that and I won't delve into that much. Some good videos on YouTube about shadowing in Russian and it's definitely an important topic. And there are some that say, hey, you should do something like exercise while you're shadowing so that your juices are flowing and you're feeling good and things like that and you'll more easily remember things. So that's something to keep in mind too. The point I want to emphasize though is attentive listening. So this is what I've noticed. Those that come out with good pronunciation and good Russian, so to speak, are those that listen very carefully. And how do you know whether you're saying a word correctly or not? It doesn't really happen by you remembering in your visual memory what the word looks like, where the accent mark goes, and things like that. Reading, that's all fine and good. However, if you want to be able to say the word or know when someone's saying it incorrectly, then that all comes from your auditory memory. And I can't stress that enough that those that have learned Russian well, know how to have good pronunciation, they have listened a lot. And not only the volume of listening, but the quality of listening. You have to listen very attentively. If you're going to learn the difference between и and и or ш and ш, then you have to listen very, very carefully. Again, set realistic goals and expectations. Remember that learning how to communicate in Russian is a mountain to climb and not a sprint. You're not going to get there in 14 days or a month or three months or anything like that. It's going to take potentially years, depending upon your situation. Do not, and I made this mistake, I bought a bunch of Harry Potter books in the very beginning. I wasn't able to read them. It was very discouraging. I can probably read them now with a translator next to me because I need to translate some of the words. But just don't do that. It's not worth the frustration of buying non-adaptive books in Russian. Now, if you can find A0 books for a very beginner, or if you're at A1, buy something that's adapted to your level and there's lots of stuff out there, then more power to you. That's an excellent way to do it. Okay, so don't expect to be able to form very many new sentences at this point. A lot of people get frustrated because six months goes by, maybe even a year goes by, and they're noticing all they can do is repeat stuff. Don't worry about it. That's one of the things in Russian where you shouldn't rely on yourself being able to construct new sentences. Now, you should be able to repeat plenty of sentences that you've heard because you know how those sentences go. You get the verb conjugation and the noun and adjective declination included when you're repeating after something that you've heard. But don't expect to be able to actually form brand new sentences without actually having understood grammar to some extent. So just allow yourself the time to become familiar with the basics of grammar before you expect new sentences out of yourself. Okay, next you need to learn the Russian seven-letter spelling rule. This is very important. It's a part of grammar, but it's a very basic type of thing. It's knowing where you would write y or where you would write e after a particular set of seven letters, and it comes in very handy. You might think, well, it's just, you know, whenever these letters show up, but it turns out that these are very important for forming adjectives, and at some point you do need to learn the difference between the forms that adjectives take and the forms that adverbs take and things like that. That becomes a very useful thing to do. Okay, so you'll need to begin learning about the noun genders and basic pluralization in the nominative case. The nominative case is just the form of the word that you find in the dictionary. You know, let's take the word sabaca. It might change in other cases, but that's the nominative case, just the basic form of the word dog, sabaca, and you should learn how to pluralize that, et cetera, et cetera, and what the basic rules of pluralization is in the nominative case and so forth. Just start with everything in the nominative case to keep it simple, and then you also want to learn how the adjectives will match the genders of nouns, both in the singular and in the plural, but limit yourself to the nominative case. So that's kind of the first step of matching the adjectives, nouns, both in number and gender, in the simplest of forms. Later on, you'll get into how cases change all of that stuff. Next, continue to familiarize yourself with vocabulary, how various words sound and are pronounced from basic dialogues or stories written for beginners. It's best to rely on audio, as I said, as much as possible. Don't assume that you know how a word should be pronounced just by looking at it, for example, until you've actually listened to the word. Your visual memory and understanding of rules will often lead you astray, while your auditory memory will generally put you on the right path. Yeah, so you can see that I'm reading this. I'm going to actually post this roadmap underneath the video, so check it out down there, but I'm just trying to kind of explain it and give some narrative alongside what you'll see down below. Next, you want to learn about cognates shared between English and Russian. I'm talking about words like internet, internet, telephone, telephone, television, television, and there are many, many more. I've got a book full of them, and so that's one good way to start learning a lot of vocabulary, and a lot of times this is like a breath of fresh air for a lot of people because they realize, oh, I already know a lot of Russian words, and then there's also this, the day comes when you're enlightened and you learn that these co words also have kind of like cognates within Russian, and so some examples, the situation, I'm sorry, the word situation in English is ситуация in Russian, for example. The word tradition in English is традиция. The word for meditation is медитация, and so on and so forth, and also want to give one thing that I didn't write in here, but in terms of remembering genders, there's this cool little rule to remember these words that end with ost, O-S-T, soft sign. Those are always feminine, and so there are hundreds or thousands of those, and once you get one of those down, then you know how to do all the rest of them, and so it can feel from time to time when you're memorizing all these different noun genders, like you have to remember each and every one. Well, in some ways that's true. However, there are certain patterns, and we'll get back to that whole concept of patterns here in just a moment. So next, you will learn about the basics of verb conjugation, the different varieties of types of verbs and conjugations, as well as the concept of verbal aspects, imperfective versus perfective. The imperfective being a process, something is happening, like я буду читать, basically means I will be reading. Я прочитаю, I will read, and I will be done with it, essentially. I will read it till it's done, and so that's the concept to start grasping at that particular point in time. Then after that, you need to start studying cases, but you want to do it in a very smart manner. You want to start with the right cases, and generally the prepositional and accusative cases are a great place to start. You can then go into the basic forms of dative and genitive and instrumental cases, and when I'm talking here about the basic forms, I'm talking about the ones that you meet on a regular basis. So there are a lot of them that will only be triggered by certain verbs. There's a lot that you can learn there, but I wouldn't bother with that too much because you're going to get yourself distracted. Just stick with this kind of rule where if you see something that's regular, learn all that stuff first, and the stuff that you rarely see, just put that off till later because you might not even need to know it, or it might only come up in certain cases where it's just important for that situation only. Also, I skipped a part here. Learn the difference between na and v as it applies to both the prepositional and the accusative cases. There's a lot that could be said about that, but just give yourself some time to absorb all the various nuances between them and how they're used in both the prepositional and the accusative cases. When you do start studying the cases, make sure that, yeah, go ahead and use the big chart, that big confusing chart. It's very, it's like very intimidating. A lot of people think of it with fear and trembling because they think, oh I've got to hold this whole chart in my mind. It's not true. You don't. The chart is useful for beginning, but I'll tell you, I haven't looked at a chart in, I don't know how long, a year or two, something like that probably, because there are certain patterns. Like if you have a male noun and you need to put it in a particular case, there's going to be a pattern between the adjective and the noun and how that works. And then if you have something that's feminine, that's going to have a type of conjugation that is consistent across all these various patterns. So there's two things you need to do is have these families of patterns between adjectives and nouns and including singular and plural of what all these cases look like when they all get combined with an adjective and a noun in the singular or plural and how that looks in each and every case. So just a simple example, the instrumental case, uchitel. A singular would be uchitelim or plural would be uchitelami. And if I wanted to say good teachers or with good teachers, I'd say haroshimi uchitelami. So there are these, like I said, that's just demonstrating one of the patterns, but you need to look for those patterns. If you don't recognize that there's a pattern there, then it can be extremely frustrating, extremely intimidating. So I strongly recommend, as I've talked about those patterns in my other videos, that you recognize those. And along with that goes word families. So there are families of words that look similar, like let's say paluchenia or izuchenia. They both end with ie or ie, basically. And so they conjugate in the same way. So if you have words with similar endings, like ost that I mentioned earlier, like if I were to say, I can speak with ease, like it is, ya umeyo gavrit slyokostyu, with ease. Or I speak with difficulty, ya gavryu strudnostyu. So those, hopefully you can see the point, that families of words decline in very similar ways. And so not only do you want to see the patterns between the adjectives and the nouns, but you want to make sure that you understand that there are patterns between all these different words that you can group into a family. And so those are the basic mental concepts that you have to formulate. And I think this comes to Russian speakers who are native very naturally. They just grow up with it and they see all these connections and it just happens. And that's why it's so easy for them to actually speak Russian. Whereas if you never make these connections as a foreigner, then it can be extremely frustrating, extremely intimidating, and extremely difficult. Okay, so next what I would say is after you've learned na and v, you need to start learning about how na, v, and k, another preposition that can be used with verbs of motion and things like that, how they relate to their pairs of s, so na and s, or v and iz, or k and at. So basically, whereas the first version, like ya payedu v magazin, v magazin, that gets paired with iz, because if I'm coming from the store, a magazin, it's iz magazin. Ya uyedu iz magazin. I'm leaving from the store. So those are basically pairs that go together and you need to understand that. Learn then about the concept of reflexive verbs and how they work. At some point you need to learn about personal pronouns and how they decline, including the various forms of sibya. So whether it's possessive pronouns or just regular personal pronouns, whether it's on, ana, yeyo, yevo, that whole group, tvoy, tvayevo, vash, vashy, vashi, all that kind of stuff. You need to get all that stuff nailed down. And I just want to emphasize, although I do intend this to be a sequential order, there's some flexibility in here because not everybody's going to learn things in exactly this particular order. But this is the recommended basic sequence of things that I'm recommending that you learn in order to be successful. Next, you want to learn connective phrases in Russian, like несмотря на то, что, до сих пор, расскажу о том, перед тем, как, до того, как, после того, как, and so on and so forth. So these are what I call connective tissue or connective phrases that are used constantly in Russian. And like if I want to say, I want to get a snack before I go to sleep or something, then I need to know how to use one of these connective. I mean, there are many ways to say it, but one of the ways to say it is by using one of these connected phrases, connective phrases. So that's very important. Also, you want to learn the basics about verbs of motion. Now, verbs of motion is also one of these scary topics that people talk about. However, I don't think you need to make it scary. Just learn the basic concept of unidirectional motion versus multidirectional motion, and use the basic forms of verbs of motion, like идти, ходить, ехать, ездить, as kind of your prototypes. And you can leave all the other ones, летить, летать, to fly, плыть, плавать, to swim or to float or sail, and all the other ones until later. They are really not all that important compared to the basic prototypes of идти, ходить, and ехать, ездить. Those are the very important ones to learn, because they not only pop up in forms of speech where you're talking about actual motion, but they pop up in forms of speech where you're talking about metaphorical motion. Like, if you want to say, an idea came to mind, I can say, идея пришла в голову, right? So, an idea came into my head. So, and it's also used, you know, время идет, время летит, time flies, or time goes on, or like, let's say, it's raining, дождь идет, идет снег, for example. So, those verbs of motion are important in not only motion context, but in others as well. But again, just start with the most basic prototypical things. And the same thing goes for, at some point I wanted to talk about participles. Learn just some of the real basic things, like, say, reading a book, I thought about my friend, читая книгу. So, these forms like читая, those are seen fairly often, but there is a whole set of participles that are used in literature, and so forth, that you hardly ever hear in everyday speech. So, put them off. You don't need to do all that stuff first, because if you do, again, you're just going to be cramming, you're going to get yourself distracted, it's going to be a big headache. So, don't worry about it. Just, you know, try to understand, first of all, that all that complex stuff with participles is 99% of the time not even used in regular Russian speech, and that was something I didn't know going into it. So, these are the kinds of things that myself or a teacher can help guide you in, so that you're not wasting your time on some topic that you really don't need to know, like cramming all of the verbs of motion. It's a waste of time. Just learn the basics, and then kind of let the other stuff come as it's necessary. Oh, the other thing I want to say is when you're talking about verbs of motion, you want to learn all of the prefixes. They don't only apply to verbs of motion, but they apply to other words as well. So, whether it's вы, вы, от, у, there's a whole bunch of them, and they all have a certain meaning that you can almost guess the meaning of the word 99% of the time just by knowing the word and then knowing the meaning of the prefix. So, like, for example, to procrastinate. Откладываться. So, кладывать is to put something. So, от means away from, not just like leaving, but away from. And so, it means to put it off, to put it away. Откладываться, procrastinate, to put things off. So, again, these prefixes, learn them all. There aren't that many of them, and they're extremely helpful in understanding the Russian language. It's like, in English, the equivalent would be phrasal verbs. So, a lot of times we add up or on or down or whatever. These different directional type things to our basic verbs, and they give it a slightly different meaning. It's the same thing in Russian. They don't really have phrasal verbs, but what they have instead are prefixes. So, learn all of those prefixes, and you should find that very, very helpful. Okay, I'm going to try to wrap this up because we're already 30 minutes into it, but then the last thing is just listen a lot to podcasts, YouTube videos on a daily, regular basis. Whether it's 20 minutes or whether it's two hours, the most important thing that it's regular, right? And if you're using subtitles, try not to use English subtitles. Try to use only Russian subtitles. I have an app called Reverso Context that allows me in YouTube videos to just mouse over a particular word that I don't know, and it will give me the translation right there in the video. So, tools like that, I'm not going to go, there's tons of that stuff. I'm not going to go into that during this video, but as many of those types of things that you can access will help you along the way just to speed up the process. Oh, and one thing I forgot to put in here is find yourself a good translator or dictionary. Google, although it's, you know, relatively good, can give you some suggestions how a word should be translated, but I found another one called Yandex, or Yandex, that will not only give you some translations, but will give you examples of sentences and so forth, and that's the big thing. A lot of people will say, well, how do I memorize vocabulary? Well, what you want to do is write down the translation, and then you want to write down a whole bunch of different sentences that use that word. Well, you're not going to be able to do that the first time you encounter a word because you barely know what the word means, and so just to get another word, single word translation, isn't good enough. So try to find something that's going, like Reverso, Context, or Yandex, or some dictionary that's not only going to give you several translations depending upon the context, but also a bunch of examples used in sentences, and then if you want to write down those sentences or locate others that fit that same usage, that can be a huge help. And then lastly, speaking practice. Some people want you to speak from the very beginning. Some people want you to have a silent period. I say do whatever you feel like doing. Again, step one was to set your goals, so speaking from the beginning is one of those goals, then go for it. But if just, you know, if you're a shy person and you don't want to embarrass yourself or speak early, don't worry about it. I mean, you're the master of this process. Don't let other people tell you what to do. Now, I do think, again, it's important to hire a teacher along the way, at least for part of your journey, because they know the path much better than you do, and so they can give you the guidance that you need, and they can be extremely helpful, not only for giving you that guidance, but for conversational practice and things like that. So whether you want to find yourself a language partner, your teacher to practice speaking with and listening to, or one of the things that's often advised is talking to yourself. So I often find myself falling asleep at night, and I'm actually saying, okay, how would I say I comb my hair in the morning or dry myself off with a towel, and you know, just to give all those various details about what I'm doing during the day. And you can narrate your experience. What are you doing right now? You know, I am sitting here at a table giving you guys a little speech that's going far too long about how to learn Russian, and you know, so the task would be, all right, for me to think, how would I say that in Russian? So I'm going to leave you guys with that, because I don't want this video to turn out to be too long. I'm going to post this document below the video, so you don't have to go to Google Docs or anything like that. It'll be right there for you. And as time goes on, if I think of other things I need to add, or if you guys have some suggestions for modifying this roadmap, then just let me know. But please share the video with your friends. I think this video will, whether or not it's seen by many people, it will fill a niche that's not necessarily addressed within the learning Russian community of teachers and students, etc. So with that, I wish you all the best in learning Russian. Hopefully you found this video and the advice that I've given here useful, and you'll be able to use the roadmap below. Have a great day. Bye.