6 tips for learning Russian

Hello and good day to every single one of you reading these lines! In case you didn't know, I am a proud native Russian speaker, born and raised in Moscow, and what I've been noticing lately is that Russian is a pretty intriguing language for many people (as it is an incredible language, honestly).

Some are tempted by the idea of reading the original works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, others simply enjoy a challenge (because learning Russian is indeed a challenge) - whatever the reason may be, this language is definitely worth learning, and I am here to help you get acquainted with it (at the very least).

Tip #1. Don't rush it

It might seem fun to learn a couple of basic words and phrases ("da", "nyet", "dobry den", "spasibo", "do svidania" etc., on which, by the way, I can absolutely make a separate post, just DM me in Instagram if you'd like that to happen), in this right here is a common trap amongst all polyglots. Mastering basic vocabulary without understanding the basic phonetics of the language is not a great idea, that's why my primary advice would be to work a lot on the phonetics of the Russian language at the very beginning. The optimal way to do that is to listen to a native speaker pronouncing separate sounds and repeating after them.

Tip #2. Pay attention to the stress marks

Stress marks are crucial when you're studying the Russian language. And this tip here is in a way related to the first tip because folks loooooove learning basic Russian vocabulary and pronouncing all of it with just outright wrong stresses (I myself saw this happen on too many occasions, unfortunately). And, let's agree, when someone gets a stress wrong, it does not sound good at all and sometimes it's actually really hard to understand them. The same way in English it would not be the best if someone was saying pretty complicated phrases but with all the wrong stresses: "Hello! Very pleasant to be here today!" To be frank, though, this example sucks because in Russian it's ten times worse since even the basic words in our vocabulary are longer, often containing three syllables or more, so the chance of getting the stress wrong increases immensely.

Tip #3. Keep in mind the standard speaking norm

You may have noticed that, when talking about the first tip, I mentioned the word "spasibo" ("спасибо", means "thank you") and the phrase "do svidania" ("до свидания", means "goodbye"). You will find that, even though in the original spelling it's "spasibo" and "do svidania", the standard speaking norm in the country is to pronounce them as "spasiba" (or "spasibuh", whichever way you understand better) and "da svidania"/"duh svidania" accordingly. So you will often have to learn to pronounce some letters "o" as letters "a" or "u" (thus your go-to sound will be "uh"). I decided to put this in this post as a separate tip because I feel like not many people are told this from the beginning, which may later cause trouble in comprehension.

Let's take this one sentence as an example. Imagine yourself talking to a native Russian speaker. You ask them anything, let's say, it's "Why are you buying this coffee?" and they reply with "Because I want that" (meaning "Because I want to do that"). In Russian that's "Потому что я этого хочу", "Potomu chto ya ehtogo hochu". But what you will probably hear them say instead will be "Patamu shtuh ya ehtava huchu". So here you can see that not only do we change the "oh" sound to the "uh" sound, but also sometimes the "ch" sound to the "sh" sound and the "g" sound to the "v" sound. Be wary of that from the very beginning because it'll save you a lot of confusion later on.

Tip #4. Beware the Russian cursive

Let me show you the way my own name is spelled in Russian cursive. But please, don't cry, okay?

If you cannot tell if there are actual different letters there, it's absolutely normal. The thing about the Russian cursive, or just in general about the way Russians handwrite is such that you have to be ready for letters looking very different from the letters you will see in the printed alphabet, in books, online etc. It gets even trickier after that because almost every single person in Russia has a pretty unique handwriting so the same letter, even handwritten, may look different (for example, I myself handwrite the capital "A" simply as a large "a", which you can see in my name above, "Alina", it's allowed by the Russian language norms but for beginners it may be difficult to understand).

Tip #5. Our sentence structure is fun

Why is it fun? That's because in Russian all of the following options of sentence structure are possible and are used:

• "I go hiking every weekend with my family."

• "Hiking I go every weekend with my family."

• "Every weekend hiking I go with my family."

• "Every weekend with my family hiking I go."

• "With my family hiking I go every weekend." etc. etc. etc.

Literally every single way of arranging different parts of this sentence ("I", "go hiking", "every weekend", "with my family") is plausible and is used by people who speak Russian. It honestly depends on the situation but often the main principle is that we put the most important information in the beginning of the sentence.

So, for example, you would say "With my family I go hiking every weekend" if you want to underline that, however, you also go hiking with your friends regularly on week days a few times a year.

This point is pretty hard to convey in one pretty and elegant rule because I am in no way a professor or Russian as a foreign language but I hope you get the extremely vague picture I'm painting here.

Tip #6. Russian is not actually that hard

Okay, don't get me wrong, it is pretty hard in comparison to most languages, but at the same time it's not as hard as it may seem. Let me explain.

Yes, the alphabet is different (depends on where you're from, though) so it may be scary at first. Yes, word structure and sentence structure are complicated. Yes, we do not only have to accord verbs and adjectives and some other things with the nouns' gender but there is also such a thing as grammatical cases (don't even get me started on this). And yes, there is a ton of slang (again, thanks to complicated word and sentence structure). In short, it's a rich language. But you can really minimize the pain of learning all the vocabulary by paying attention to the words that were borrowed from other languages (mostly English and French).

Computer, television (it's not exactly the same word but it's very close), microwave oven (also not exactly the same but is a literal translation from English), library (almost the same way you would say that in French and many other languages) etc. I know I'm naming just a few but these are mere examples, there are actually so, so many of these.

P. S. : Funnily enough, we have, for example, the same word as in French, "cauchemar" ("кошмар"), it is literally pronounced the same way and has all the same meanings - "nightmare", but also, just as in French, it's used as an interjection to describe something bad ("Quel cauchemar !" = "Какой кошмар!"). So, if you're a francophone and you did not learn Russian a day in your life, congrats, you just learnt your first Russian word!

All that being said, these are all the tips I have for you today!

Hope you enjoyed them! I know, six is not a lot but if you're interested in reading more of these, please let me know and I'll make a second part to this p