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Sunday, June 26th
LinguaLift takes a personalized approach to helping people learn Russian across six levels of fluency. An affordable subscription gives you access to help from tutors and a customized learning plan, and the first three lessons are free to use if you want to give the service a try. You might need to pair LinguaLift with an app for extra practice, especially for speaking Russian, but these lessons are the most approachable, comprehensive and enjoyable ones on the market today. LinguaLift earns our highest rating.
If you're a complete beginner to learning Russian and you don't want to commit to an ongoing subscription plan, Rocket Languages' Russian lessons are a decent place to start. You'll get almost 150 hours of lesson time that includes plenty of reading, writing, listening and even cultural information, all for a one-time cost of less than $150 (or less than $100 if Rocket is offering a promotion). More advanced students won't get what they need with Rocket Russian, but newbies should give it a try with a free guest account.
If you're interested in learning the language, you likely already realize that it's going to be more challenging than some. First off, Russian uses a completely different alphabet, Cyrillic, from what you're using right now to read in English. Training your mind to recognize the new symbols and the sounds they make (or to make different sounds using letters that look similar between Cyrillc and the Roman alphabet) can take some time.
You'll also have to master a grammatical system that's quite different from English. Do you know the difference between the nominative case and the dative case? It's okay if you don't - because of the six cases used in Russian, we only use three in modern English.
Feeling discouraged? Don't be! Russian is ranked as a Level III language by the US State Department, marking it merely as a "hard" language and not as difficult as Level IV languages like Arabic or Chinese. Whew! And with the right type of Russian lessons, you could find yourself reading, writing, understanding and speaking the language more fluently than you imagined.
So, what makes a Russian language program the "right type" ? Some of that depends on you. Do you learn best by reading detailed explanations of grammar or by learning useful words and phrases in context? Do you like your learning to feel like playing games or do you prefer a more straightforward, traditional approach? If you're not sure about the answers to any of those questions, that's fine: most Russian lessons have a free lesson or give you limited access to the platform so you can try it for yourself. Put a few providers to the test and see which ones keep coming to mind - or which approach helps what you've learned to "stick" the best!
Generally speaking, there are a few factors that can make a particular system for learning Russian better than another. Those include:
TopConsumerReviews.com has evaluated and ranked today's top resources for learning Russian online. We're confident that this information will help you choose the Russian lessons that will boost your fluency in no time!
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