Learn Russian by reading.

The best way to learn Russian is to read real Russian texts with instant tap-to-translate, learning the highest-frequency words first and locking them in with spaced repetition. Cyrillic takes a week or two; six noun cases and verb aspect are what reading a lot of Russian teaches you faster than any grammar table.
Start on the cloudSelf-host, free

Cloud is in beta · self-hosting is free forever

Lector reading a Russian passage with colour-coded word states and click-to-translate
Native speakers
~145 million
Difficulty (FSI)
Category III
To proficiency
~1,100 hours
Why Russian

Reasons to start.

01

Around 145 million native speakers and roughly 210 million in total — the most spoken native language in Europe, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

02

Official or widely used from Belarus and Kazakhstan across Central Asia, with an enormous body of literature, film and scientific writing behind it.

03

Cyrillic looks harder than it is: 33 letters, mostly regular, learned in a week or two. The alphabet is the small part.

Bonus: Ukrainian and Belarusian are close relatives, and Russian gives you a large head start on Bulgarian, Serbian and Polish vocabulary. The alphabet carries straight over to Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian.

Is it hard? How long?

The honest version.

FSI Category III (~1,100 hours), a hard tier for English speakers. The alphabet is the easy part. The work is six noun cases, verb aspect pairs (говорить / сказать), and lexical stress that moves without warning — which is exactly what a lot of reading, with a dictionary one tap away, drills into place.
Whatever the category, the method is the same: read a lot of Russian, learn the most common words first, and let a spaced-repetition system resurface them right before you forget. See the method.
A line of Russian

Вечером, когда солнце садится за реку, люди выходят на улицу, чтобы поговорить и посмотреть, как дети играют во дворе.

In the evening, when the sun sets behind the river, people come out into the street to talk and watch the children playing in the yard.

How Lector helps

Read it. Practice it. Remember it.

The reader (above) turns any Russian text into a lesson — tap any word to translate it, hear it in a native voice, and track what you know. Then frequency-ordered cloze practice locks the core vocabulary in, and mined words push straight to Anki.
Practice

Drill the words that matter first.

Frequency-ordered cloze sentences build the core of Russian vocabulary, scheduled by spaced repetition so each one returns right when you're about to forget it — in multiple-choice or typing mode. Practise listening to native pronunciation on every word and sentence, powered by Google text-to-speech.
Russian cloze practice in Lector with multiple-choice options
Free resources

Free resources to get you started.

The Russian reference data below is free to use on its own. To turn it into a full reading course, self-host Lector for free or start on the cloud from $5/mo.

Russian reference data

Where the Russian dictionary and cloze bank come from, with counts and full licensing.

Browse the data

New to Anki?

A from-scratch guide to spaced-repetition flashcards and loading your first Russian deck.

Getting started with Anki
Questions

Learning Russian, answered.

More on the method, or jump into the docs.
Is Russian hard to learn?

Russian is genuinely challenging for English speakers, in the same tier as Polish and Turkish. Cyrillic takes a week or two and is not the obstacle. The real work is six noun cases, verb aspect, and stress that shifts between forms of the same word.

How long does it take to learn Russian?

The US Foreign Service Institute places Russian in Category III, needing roughly 1,100 class hours (about 44 weeks of intensive study) to reach professional working proficiency. Reading daily brings recognition of common words and simple texts far sooner than that.

What is the best way to learn Russian?

Learn the alphabet first, then read real Russian with lookups a tap away, prioritising the most frequent words and using spaced repetition to keep them. Cases and aspect are learned much faster from thousands of real examples than from paradigm tables.

Can I learn Russian for free?

Yes. Russian has an enormous free corpus — public-domain literature, open courses, news and podcasts — plus free and self-hosted reading tools and spaced-repetition software, so no paid course is required.

Get involved

Learning Russian? You're in good company.

Come chat with other learners on our Discord — swap resources, compare progress, ask questions, and stay motivated while you read your way in.
Join the Discord

Start reading Russian today.

Open source to self-host for free, or on our cloud in a click.

Start on the cloudSelf-host, free