Successful Russian learners know that if you learn ten new words today but forget ten old ones from yesterday that you won’t make much progress.  You need a plan to keep old vocabulary while learning new vocabulary.  Our Russian learning software can help you learn to speak and understand Russian quickly and retain what you learned with a small amount of review time.

3.  Once Per Week Russian Tutoring  is Useless

Well it’s not exactly true that weekly tutoring is useless, but it is true that weekly tutoring by itself, just like a weekly class with no other studying won’t help you learn much.  Weekly tutoring can be an absolutely wonderful as an addition to a program that includes study with our software or other daily study.

Human teachers are absolutely wonderful at encouraging you and correcting you.  Software is absolutely wonderful at being infinitely patient, available 24 hours per day and very cheap compared to human teachers.

Software can also schedule your study for exactly the right interval that will help you develop your Russian language skills much faster.

4.  Avoid Gimmicks

There are so many useless things on the market for people who want to learn Russian it’s amazing.  My favorite is the catchy but useless Russian Word of the Day.  This kind of thing is only good if you use it to remind you to really study and learn rather than pretending to study and learn.

5.  Practice Every Chance You Get

Every time I meet someone with an accent that makes me think they might be Russian I always say, “I like your accent, where are you from?”  I’ve had fun talking Russian all around the United States and across Western Europe and the Pacific.

Russians like to travel.  After you know a few phrases, find out if they are Russian and if so try talk Russian with them.  It’s okay if you don’t know much at first.

6.  Learn Before You Fly

People who get off the plane in Moscow not knowing any Russian are lost and usually stay lost!  While I highly recommend learning Russian in Russia if you can, you should study and learn as much as possible before you get there.

7.  Keep Your Emotions Positive

Your emotions can destroy your Russian learning plans if you aren’t careful.  Do everything you can to stay enthusiastic and positive.  Learn to love your mistakes, they are an essential part of the learning process.

Essential means you can’t become fluent without making lots of mistakes along the way.

8.  Grammar is Not That Important

Unless of course you happen to love grammar.  If you loved studying English grammar in school you will probably love studying Russian grammar.  If you remember loving English grammar, then run to a book store buy a Russian grammar book.

If you hated studying English grammar, then by all means don’t start learning Russian by studying Russian grammar.  You will probably hate it just as much as you hated English grammar.

Fortunately it’s possible to learn a lot of Russian without learning any grammar.  Both our program and Pimsleur will do this for you.

9.  All Study is Self Study

Academic classes, while sometimes useful, are places where a teacher presents the material.  Then you are then supposed to go home and learn it by doing the homework.  Successful Russian learners know that the best a Russian language teacher can do is to present the material in an interesting way and to give you feedback later.

You always have to go learn the material on your own, whether you take a class or not.  No one ever succeeds in an academic Russian class without putting in a lot of study time outside of class.

Successful Russian learners know that their progress depends on their own efforts, not the teacher.  A teacher cannot make you learn Russian, he or she can only help you learn Russian.

Learning a language is always a course of self study, even if you take an in person class.

10.  Remember How Good it Will Be!

Remember how good it will be when you can speak your next language.  Successful Russian learners know how much better their life will become when they learn a new language. It’s like becoming a new you.  Every Russian will think that it is very cool that you have learned his or her language.

There is a reason why people who learn one language often go on to learn Russian or some other language.  The reason is that they had so much fun learning their first language that they wanted learn another one!

Last Updated – September 1, 2010