Learn Russian with Flashcards

Why Flashcards Work for Learning Russian

MindCards uses scientifically-proven learning techniques to help you master Russian vocabulary faster and remember it longer.

Why Learn Russian?

Russian is spoken by approximately 150 million native speakers and is widely used as a second language across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, where it functions as a regional lingua franca. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations and is the most widely spoken Slavic language in the world. Russian is the language of a rich literary tradition — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Pushkin wrote in Russian — as well as a major language for science, mathematics, chess, and classical music.

Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, a 33-letter script that looks unfamiliar to most Western learners but can be learned in a matter of days with focused practice. Beyond the script, Russian grammar features six grammatical cases that change noun and adjective endings based on their role in the sentence — a system that takes time to master but gives the language remarkable expressive precision. MindCards structures your Russian learning in two deliberate stages: a Cyrillic guide to build reading fluency, followed by an A1 vocabulary path that targets the highest-frequency words so your early study effort pays off as quickly as possible.