New Course: Beginner Russian for Professionals

Most beginner language courses prepare you for travel basics. Nothing wrong with that, we have a travel “Essentials” course in 80+ languages if you need it.

But what if you’re a beginner with more serious personal and professional needs?

Do more than just survive your next vacation. Thrive in the Russophone world personally and professionally with 118+ hours of material in the Beginner Russian for Professionals course!

What will you learn?

This course will take you from true beginner to CEFR A2 with 118+ hours of learning materials, including:

• 41 conversation lessons
• 69 grammar lessons
• 1,911 vocabulary items

As a beginner, nothing will build your proficiency faster than learning the most useful, high-frequency vocabulary. But providing basic vocab lists (like “colors” or “directions”) actually hurts your ability to retain what you’re learning due to “semantic interference”. It’s also just not very fun. ?‍♀️

Instead, when we develop lessons, we think of a common scenario and tell a story about it. What scenarios are you likely to be in? Who are the characters you’ll interact with? What conversations would you have?

This approach lends itself to more natural speech you might not find in a textbook approach, as well as other retention tactics like “spiraling” (resurfacing previously learned material) and “interleaving” (reinforcing material in multiple modalities and contexts). A lesson about grocery shopping can weave in numbers, colors, food items, etc. in a more effective and memorable way.

Each of the 12 units contain three lesson types that support this storytelling format:

• Conversation lessons are 60-minute exercises based on the unit theme. For example, in a unit about the workplace, a new employee gets a tour of the office and is shown his desk.
• Vocab lessons are 30-minute exercised that build vocabulary needed to understand the theme and the conversations. In the workplace unit, a supporting vocab lesson teaches both common objects around the office and possessive terms, both of which are seen in the conversation.
• Grammar lessons are 20-minute exercises that expand on grammar patterns seen elsewhere in the unit. For example, to help understand grammar introduced in the office tour conversation, a grammar lesson explicitly teaches possessive pronouns in the prepositional case.