Russian Language Resources

Talk radio and podcasts are great ways to immerse yourself in the language. Try picking shows about topics you are interested in, and perhaps already familiar with. For example, it might be interesting to listen to a podcast about American politics, history, or culture, both because you will already have a lot of context for the content, and because a Russian perspective on your own country might be illuminating.

The Tech Center’s Podcast Indexing and Discovery System provides a way for teachers and students to find and listen to authentic podcasts in Russian on topics they are interested in. The system retrieves podcasts from a curated set that was collected using a discovery method developed in the Tech Center.

Meduza, a Russian-language media outlet based in Latvia, offers excellent podcasts on a variety of topics, from current events, to film and TV shows, music, finance, health, parenting, and even the Russian language and linguistics.

Since Медуза was declared a foreign agent at the end of April, most of their excellent podcasts migrated to a new platform Техника речи: https://tehnikarechi.studio/. Медуза did retain its daily news podcast.

Подкасты на русском offers a sizeable catalog of Russian language podcasts, browsable by category.

Радио Arzamas presents audio lectures, courses, and podcasts on history, art, literature, and anthropology from the eponymous public humanities project.

Radio Liberty‘s long-running podcast series, featuring some by now classic émigré radio personalities.

Эхо Москвы is a cult Moscow talk radio station, known especially for providing a forum for various opposition voices that are otherwise barred from mainstream media.

Ракета is podcast aimed at beginner-level learners offering short first person narratives about everyday life using simpler vocabulary and delivered at slower speeds. Each episode comes with a transcript.

The Russian grammar channel offers short explanations of essential grammar points by UNC alum Dr. Curtis Ford.

Live Fluent offers learning resources on verbs, cases, pronunciation, spelling, and finer points of Russian grammar, compiled by learners for learners.

Rockin’ Russian, a University of Texas project, offers a fun if somewhat dated tool for engaging with popular Russian song lyrics (the videos labeled “modern” are, perhaps, “retro” now, while those labeled “retro” are, perhaps, “classic”).

Poetry Reader for Russian Learners, a Yale University project, is a collection of classic Russian poetry with audio and sets of grammar and comprehension exercises around each poem.

Real Life in Russia, a project from Michigan State University, offers a series of lessons to prepare you for everyday situations that you will encounter soon after arriving in Russia. It does include some exercises related to language, but most of the exercises are centered around the cultural and the practical.

SMARTool for English-speaking learners of Russian, linguist-built, corpus-based tool for learning the most frequent forms of 3,000 basic vocabulary items.

UGA’s Culture App is designed to help Russian Flagship students prepare for different scenarios in the Russian-speaking world.

Textbooks for self-study

Online dictionaries

GoogleTranslate gets better all the time, but it is still inferior to a good dictionary, and can still be poor at translating phrases (try the Google Document Translate function for a much better performance). Below are some useful alternatives.

A good reference grammar will not only give you the correct endings, provide rules, and explain the patterns and exceptions you may encounter, but give you insight into how the language works as a complete system of communication. Several of the grammars below are available electronically.

While not a reference grammar per se, Gramota.ru is the premier source on Russian grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation, heavily used by native speakers. The archives of their Q&A service are a treasure trove of information about the most challenging aspects of the Russian language. You can also check words against a set of key grammatical dictionaries.

Murray, John, and Sarah Smyth.Intermediate Russian: A Grammar and Workbook. New York: Routledge, 2013. Ebook!

Wade, Terence, and David Gillespie. A Russian Grammar Workbook. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Ebook!

Wade, Terence. A Comprehensive Russian Grammar. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Dunn, John and Shamil Khairov. Modern Russian Grammar. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Levin, James. Russian Grammar. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Ebook!

Timberlake, Alan. A Reference Grammar of Russian. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Ebook!

Wade, Terence. The Oxford Russian Grammar and Verbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Andrews, Edna. Russian. SEELRC, 2001. http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/mainframe.jsp?nLanguageID=6 Ebook!

Watzke, John L, and James W. Sweigert. The Russian Reference Grammar: Core Grammar in Functional Context. Washington, DC: American Council of Teachers of Russian, 1997.

Beard, Robert. Russian: An Interactive Online Grammar. 1996. https://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/