Learn Russian at home: a daily plan without classes

The advantage and the trap of learning at home

Without classes you can study whenever and at whatever pace you like. But since nobody is waiting for you, it is also easy to say “I’ll do it tomorrow”.

The fix is to turn study into a small, fixed habit: the same time, the same place, a short session every day. With your morning coffee, on your commute or before bed — what matters is that it’s the same moment every day.

A 10-minute daily routine

Step one: open today’s 10 new words. Listen to each word, look at its pronunciation and repeat it out loud at least once.

Step two: read the example sentences and notice how each word is used.

Step three: take the short daily test. Words you get wrong come back tomorrow.

A weekly plan

Learn new words six days a week and keep one day for review and a conversation lesson. In the lesson, listen to the dialogue first, then repeat every line out loud.

At this pace you learn 60–70 words a week and about 300 a month. You can finish the 300-word Russian core list in about 30 days.

How to practise speaking at home

You don’t need a teacher to practise speaking at home. Repeating words and dialogues out loud improves your pronunciation, and recording yourself helps you hear the differences.

In LinguDay’s language partners section you can meet members who speak Russian and are learning your language, and practise writing by messaging them.

Tips for learning Russian

• Listen to Russian every day

  Russian songs, cartoons and subtitled videos help your ear with stress and intonation. Repeating short sentences as you hear them improves your pronunciation quickly.

• Cognates help

  Many Russian words are familiar to English speakers: телефон, такси, ресторан, школа. Recognizing them once you can read Cyrillic gives you a quick vocabulary boost.