Russian language

Russian learning assistant
Cheat sheets
Grammar
Vocabulary
Apps
Resources
All Posts

Russian learning assistant

Learning Russian is hard and the resources can be all over the internet making it hard to find what you need when you need it. ru-pad is there to help you with this. Through multiple integrated dictionaries it will help you :-

Discover vocabulary
Create translations
Find declensions
Find conjugations
Assembly phrases and words into phrasebooks
Used spaced repetition to retain the information through integration with Anki.

If you sign up for an account all this is stored in the cloud and instantly updated on all of your devices so you can pick up from where you left off as you switch between your phone, laptop and desktop.

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Cheat sheets

Russian noun and adjective case declensions cheat sheet
Russian noun and adjective case declensions cheat sheet
Russian motion verbs cheat sheet 2
Printable cheat sheet for more russian motion verbs
Russian motion verbs cheat sheet 1
Russian motion verbs

Grammar

Russian transitive verbs
Russian transitive verbs

Vocabulary

Russian conversational verbs
How to groan, exclaim, babble and more ways to enliven your russian.
Russian angry words! Grrr!
Злые слова (Angry words)

Apps

Russian swearing
Dictionary of Russian swearing and abuse
ru-pad
Web app to research vocabulary, organise and learn
clean-audio.py for Anki
Python script to remove leading and trailing silence from audio files in you Anki media collection
Cooljigate app
Python application to conjugate russian verbs

Resources

A grab bag of websites and the such for learning russian.

Anki spaced repetition

Anki is a flashcard tool with windows, IOS and android apps which is great for learning any kind of facts, whether that is grammar rules, vocabulary or verb conjugations. You create cards and it will present them to you to learn and depending on how well you have learnt it dictates when you will next see it. This means things you know will come up less often than things you don’t know and you spend you time more effectively.

The desktop, web and android versions are free but the IOS app is paid for which supports the developer maintaining and improving it. The desktop version works on Windows, OS X and Linux. All content syncs nicely between apps so you can train on whatever device happens to be convenient.

Anki for Desktop

Ankidroid for Android

Anki for IOS

Forvo pronunciation

Russians are not in the least bit forgiving about pronunciation. Whereas in english we are very used to a extremely different accents Russians are not. There are still accents but compared to english (think the difference between a Liverpudlian and a Texan) they are barely noticeable to non native speakers.

When speaking with native speakers this means if your pronunciation is not pretty close to perfect they just won’t understand you, so all your hard work learning a horrendously complex language is for nothing. The best way to fix this is to always download the correct pronunciation when you get a new word, and ideally add the new word, with its translation and audio into Anki. Whilst russian is much more phonetic than english you need to know which vowel is stressed to pronounce it correctly (and watch for o’s sounding as a’s).

Forvo is a website that has native speakers who record any word or phrase uploaded to it which is very complete and in the instances it does not have an audio clip for a word you can expect someone to be kind enough to record it within a day of uploading.

https://www.forvo.com

Cooljigator

Russian verbs are another source of pain and you need to learn how to conjugate them. Whilst there are some common patterns there are enough exceptions and variations that you need to check each verb as you learn it, as well find it imperfective and perfective aspects.

Cooljigator is an excellent resource for this and will give you all the forms you need.