Study the lessons in order for the intended build-up — the verb engine first, then the six cases, then aspect and motion — or jump straight to the topic you need. Nothing is locked.
Learn to read Cyrillic in one hour, discover why Russian needs no word for 'is', and build your first affirmative, negative and question sentences without conjugating a single verb.
Install the whole Russian verb system in one hour: the base table of three tenses against statement, negative and question, the six present-tense endings, a past tense that marks gender instead of person, and a future built from быть plus an unchanged infinitive.
Introduce yourself properly: pick between ты and вы, ask and answer the name questions as fixed chunks, state a profession or a nationality with no verb at all, conjugate the class II -ить verbs, and make your first adjectives agree.
Russian has no verb "to have", so this lesson installs the frame that replaces it — у меня есть — fills it with the family vocabulary, adds the two irregular modals хотеть and мочь, and puts you in the dative for мне нравится, мне надо and your first imperatives.
The first real case. Answer Где? with в or на plus a changed ending, sort places into the в-list and the на-list, and say where you live, where you work and where you study.
Add the case that makes Russian sentences move: the accusative. Direct objects, the animate masculine, and the где? / куда? contrast that turns the prepositions в and на from "where" into "where to".
Russian asks what English never does: are you going on foot or by vehicle, and is this one journey or a habit? Lesson 7 installs идти, ходить, ехать and ездить, the на + transport chunks, and the only two motion prefixes you need at this level.
The genitive arrives, and it does three jobs at once: saying what you do not have, saying how much of something there is, and following the seven prepositions that always take it. Nothing, nobody, never and nowhere come with it, and Russian double negation stops being a mystery.
The dative is the friendliest of the Russian cases: three endings in the singular, two in the plural, and no animacy to worry about. It names the person everything is aimed at — the one you help, ring, give, show and explain to — and it is the case of «Мне холодно», «Мне надо» and «Мне тридцать лет», three sentences with no subject and no verb at all.
The last of the six cases, and the best shortcut in Russian: one set of endings covers "with a friend", "with a pen" and "as a doctor", and eight frozen forms tell you when anything happens — утром, вечером, зимой.
Numbers arrive, and with them the one rule that changes the ending of every noun in Russian: one takes the nominative, two to four the genitive singular, five and above the genitive plural. Prices, payment and the nine counting nouns come with it — and by the end of the hour you can buy something in Russian from start to finish.
Twelve lessons in, the whole noun system goes on one page: six cases against four noun shapes, three declensions including the soft-sign third, the animacy rule in full, adjectives that follow their noun into every case, and every A1 preposition sorted by the case it governs. No new field of vocabulary — this is the map you have been building since Lesson 5.
Every Russian verb comes in two halves, and this lesson installs both. Seventeen high-frequency aspect pairs, the ten prefixes that build the perfective, the rule that the present tense belongs to the imperfective alone, and the four meanings a past tense can carry.
Russian has two futures, and one of them looks exactly like the present tense. This lesson puts them side by side — буду делать against сделаю — adds the time adverbs that choose the aspect for you, and fixes the когда-clause trap that catches almost every English speaker.
Eleven prefixes and two verbs, and you can arrive, leave, enter, come out, reach, drop in, pass, cross, approach and step away — on foot or by vehicle. This lesson builds the whole prefixed motion system of Russian, gives you the surprising past that comes with it, and teaches you how to ask for and follow a route.
The last of the sixteen core lessons: the whole Russian verb in one grid — three tenses, two aspects, six persons — then the fourteen conjugation classes, every irregular that matters, the complete imperative, and twelve survival scenarios you can now handle without a single new word.
The clock in four frames, the seven days and twelve months in lowercase, dates that change case, the two grammars of the weather, and the frequency adverbs that put your whole week on a scale.
The little ending -ся hides five different meanings, from "wash yourself" to "the house is being built" to sentences with no subject at all. This lesson builds every -ся verb of daily life — умываться, встречаться, бояться, жениться, мне хочется — and ends with the story of your own day.
How to ask for anything in Russian without sounding blunt: the four-rung politeness ladder, the particle бы that makes the conditional, the complete ты/вы switch, извините against простите, and the four frames that report a problem and get it fixed.
Say what you think and how you feel, and make the sentences hold together: four opinion frames, polite agreement and disagreement, the two families of feeling words, and the connector kit — потому что, поэтому, но, однако, хотя, если and чтобы — that turns separate statements into real speech.
Order a meal from the menu to the bill, complain politely when it goes wrong, and describe what hurts at the doctor's and in the pharmacy: the three ordering frames, the portion genitive (чашка кофе, тарелка супа), food preferences, and the health frame «У меня болит голова», with the aspect pairs заказывать/заказать and болеть/заболеть.
Everything the journey throws at you, in Russian: buying tickets, checking into a hotel, shopping for clothes and handling an emergency — eight real-life scenarios built entirely from the cases, aspects and imperatives you already own, plus the fixed chunks that get you a room, a receipt and, if it comes to it, help.
The lesson that makes you sound Russian rather than translated: theme-and-rheme word order and inversion for emphasis, the particle kit (же, ведь, ну, вот, даже, всё-таки, ли, -то, -нибудь), the five intonation melodies ИК-1 to ИК-5, and the word-formation models that turn every root you know into a family of words — including the three registers of Russian names and the polite patronymic.
The final challenge: no new grammar, just the two engines — the verb matrix and the case map — running at speed through twelve real-life scenarios, forty-two exercises reaching back over the whole course, and the one-page cheat sheet that sums all of it up.
