craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

Looking at the keywords people use to bring them to this site, "Learn Russian" is one of the most common searches. This is because of my previous article on How to Learn Old Church Slavonic, in which I argued that it is necessary to learn Russian as the first step to learning OCS. However, I didn't actually go into any detail about how one learns Russian, which means that the poor visitors to my site who had come with that search query doubtless left empty-handed.

It would not be possible to write an article about how to learn Russian that would be applicable to all sorts of readers and situations, but I can at least tell the story here about how I learned Russian, in the hope that it might provide some useful pointers for someone who wants to learn it—especially someone who decides to go the self-taught route like I did.

I give nearly full credit to my having learned Russian to the aptly-named book Teach Yourself Russian by Daphne West. With this book and a Russian-English dictionary I was over the course of a couple years able to teach myself the alphabet, basic vocabulary, and grammar of Russian, all without a teacher. Now, I make no secret of the fact that I am something of a language enthusiast (the variety of articles in my Languages category should make that clear enough), but all natural aptitude aside, I think that anybody who has sufficent motivation can be equally succesful. I had learned French already so this was not my first exposure to a foreign language though, which probably did help. Still, this was my first language with a different alphabet, and (as turns out to be more important—alphabets aren't as big a deal as it might seem when you're just starting out), Russian was my first language inflected with case endings, which are a very difficult concept to wrap your head around when you first encounter them. (Those who took Latin in high school will have a head start here.)

Despite these difficulties, and the difficulty of learning vocabulary (which is the most burdensome part of learning any language), I was able to persevere because I had motivation. Russian just seemed so exotic and cool at the time (this coincided with my Tom Clancy phase), and this pushed me to continue to make progress. My ultimate goal was to be able to read War and Peace in the original (ironically, although my Russian is now good enough to do this, I still haven't gotten around to it after all these years! But I digress.) At the time I did not think I would ever travel to Russia, but due to some very fortunate circumstances, it turned out that I actually got to spend a month in Russia before I even finished Teach Yourself Russian (I was only as far as the chapter on the instrumental case, as I recall.)

This fantastic opportunity allowed me the chance to fix what was inevitably way off due to my self-taught method: my pronunciation. Among other things, I pronounced the letter x like an English h, and did not distinguish at all between stressed and unstressed o, nor the words меня and мне. (In layman's terms, my pronunciation was downright terrible.)

If you've ever seen the movie Stargate, there is a scene where the Egyptologist main character, confronted with an actual speaker of Ancient Egyptian, learns to adjust his own reconstructed pronunciation (remember that no one has heard what Ancient Egyptian actually sounded like in 4000 years), and a only few scenes later he is able to speak fluently. As it turns out, this is not just Hollywood's creative license: my situation with Russian was quite similar, and with a few adjustments, my pronunciation fell into line in no time.

I've since read many other Teach Yourself language books. Some are better than others, but generally they do a good job of getting the grammar and basic vocabulary of a language across. Such books are easy to buy and easy to begin, but in order to make it to the end you do need to be self-motivated. Lose interest in the language and culture you're learning about, and your progress will grind to a halt.

Taking things to the next level—speaking fluently—was not something I was able to do with a book. I did buy a few intermediate Russian books, and readers with the difficult vocabulary annotated, but these didn't help much. The next level of proficiency came by speaking with Russian-speakers every chance I got. Once you know the cases, verb conjugations, and tenses, you have to realise that you know enough Russian to get out there and start talking to people. Doing this not only gives you a sense of achievement in that you're actually speaking Russian: more importantly, you learn vocabulary, expressions, and cultural traits without even trying.

I was lucky in that I happened to run into a lot of Russian speakers over the years who had the patience to bother speaking with an American with a poor command of their language. This is why today I speak Russian more or less fluently (though far from perfectly—and I am quite rusty), while so many other languages that I learned the basic grammar of have languished unused. In my experience the occasions to use this language are plentiful. I have memories of long conversations in Russian not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but also Montreal, Boston, Des Moines, Lille, Havana—nearly everywhere I've spent a lot of time, and with a lot less effort to seek out Russian speakers than you might think.

So I hope those pointers will give some useful information for people looking to learn Russian. I can't say much about classroom learning because that's not how I got my start (I took some Russian classes at university, but most were taught in Russian, so it was not a beginner's experience); I also imagine that my advice would be different for those who struggle with learning languages (but I do think that Teach Yourself Russian is a good starting point even if that is you; you just might need to supplement it with other, slower paced material, to get you over the parts that cause you the most difficulty). But the main thing is to stay motivated.

So I hope that that anecdotal account will be of some use to those who have found their way here looking for information about how to learn Russian. (The next highest-ranking unanswered search traffic comes from those looking for information about Craven A cigarettes, though, and I'm sorry to say that I will not be writing an article for those searches any time soon!)