Russian language, as well as any Slavic language, is known as not an easy language to learn. Verb aspects, Cases, undefined stress letters, and many other complicated subjects usually cause feelings of helplessness and full refusal to learn Russian or any Slavic language.
However, these issues are usually caused by the wrong approach to learning the Russian language and the lack of teaching materials that show the complete structure of the language.
- Don’t worry about tenses, there are only 3 of them
3ussian language has only 3 tenses and 2 verb aspects – imperfective and perfective. Imperfective verbs describe a process of action, and perfective ones describe a result or a finished action. You will not need to learn perfect, pluscuamperfect, progressive, progressive perfect past, present, and future tenses in Russian. The verb aspect is not a tense but an aspect. Learn more about the Russian verb aspect, Serbian verb aspect, and Polish verb aspect. You can learn the perfective aspect not at once, but later, not in the very beginning, when you master verb conjugation of imperfective verbs. Conjugation of perfective verbs is the same, but rules of usage aren’t.
- Don’t spend too much time learning cases
All Russian pronouns, nouns, adjectives, and participles are declined by cases. But it doesn’t mean that you will need to learn them by rote for many hours. My recommendation is to read the rules of declension, decline 30-50 words and then look quickly at the rules and appropriate endings when you doubt which case and case ending to use.
- Don’t look for rules of stressed syllables
There is no rule about stressed syllables. Only native speakers know which syllable is stressed, some words can have different variants of the stressed syllables. The only rule is – if a word has the letter Ё – the accent is always on this letter. One must feel it. Just listen to the language and immerse yourself in it.
- Learn the rules of Reading
Often Russian words are pronounced not like written. There is no big difference between writing and pronunciation, however, one must know when the letter Г [g] has the sound В [v] when O sounds like A, and other rules.
- Read, listen, write, think
This is an universal tip for any language. Read it, listen to it, write in it, think in it. Use online chats like Hellolingo, or our PlusSpeak chat to practice Russian, or any other language, chatting is really very helpful, and maybe you will find new friends. Voice chatting is even more helpful. In total, Immerse yourself into your target language.