Real Life in Russia is a series of interactive lessons to prepare you for living abroad in Russia. Each lesson presents the necessary language, cultural knowledge, and practical information to successfully accomplish daily tasks while in Russia: from making a proper cup of tea and buying a train ticket to adding money to your cell phone and creating a social media profile on Вконтакте.
Don’t Forget Your Russian is an easy-to-navigate collection of Russian language learning resources. Use the navigation bar at the top of the page to access resources for listening, reading, grammar, learning strategies, and more.
3ears is a database of Russian-language songs, TV show excerpts, and other video clips. A transcript appears below each video, and each word in the transcript is highlighted when it is spoken or sang in the video. You can also go to the exact point in the video where a word appears by clicking it. To see the definition, declension or conjugation, and other example usages of a word, drag it to the side of the screen. 3ears is particularly useful for catching all the words in a sitcom (there are many included on the site), film, or any other video with lots of quickly spoken conversational dialogue.
If you are interested in improving your ability to understand Russian news reports, check out Луч света. Each post contains a video from a Russian news outlet, a paragraph of the necessary background information (in English), notes on language, and transcripts with English translations. First, watch the clip to see how much you comprehend. Then refer to the supplementary materials and follow along with the transcript as you listen.
Morpheem is a vocabulary learning program that assesses your current Russian vocabulary knowledge, then provides you with new words in context to learn. It continues to repeat the words until you have mastered them. The novel thing about Morpheem is that it uses real sentences, so you see how the words are actually used in writing. This is a very useful tool for developing your passive vocabulary.
Work on your reading comprehension with the Reading Russian Short Stories site. The stories are all from the 20th and 21st centuries, and include familiar names like Zoshchenko, Erofeev, and Tolstaya, plus many authors who are not well known in the West. Each story is followed by comprehension questions and activities. Try reading a story and writing out your responses for practice.
UPDATE: After a lengthy absence, Conradish is now back online. Conradish is a tool for Russian language learners to read Russian literature in the original, with English glosses. The site contains works by Достоевский, Набоков, Пастернак, Булгаков, Чехов, Толстой, Гоголь, Пушкин, and many others. When reading a text, hold your cursor over a word to get a definition; click on the word to get a fuller dictionary entry. Because this tool relies on literal translations of individual words, the definitions are not always accurate. Use Conradish in conjunction with a more detailed dictionary to get the best translation of idiomatic expressions and collocations.
Chef-daw creates cute illustrated recipe cards for all sorts of dishes and cocktails. Use them to practice cooking and food vocabulary, and to learn how to make Russian and international menu items.
Another Инфографика site, this time from Аргументы и факты. The infographics’ use of images, charts, and graphs makes the content more accessible for readers; in addition, they present topic-specific vocabulary, cultural info, and authentic, concise language.
The Russian Language Stack Exchange is a forum where learners and translators of Russian can seek advice from language experts. A useful tool for getting linguistic help at all levels.
Russian Portal 