Every Russian noun, adjective and pronoun changes form across six cases, and verbs come in aspect pairs where two separate words cover what English does with one. That means a single dictionary entry is really a small family of forms, and the family is what you need to recall in real time. Spaced repetition handles families of related facts far better than rereading does.
Why spaced repetition suits Russian
The Russian writing system
Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet — 33 letters, most learnable in an afternoon. The traps are the letters that look Latin but sound different: в is "v", р is "r", н is "n".
What English speakers find hard about Russian
- Six cases affecting nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals.
- Verbal aspect: nearly every verb has perfective and imperfective partners that must be learned together.
- Unpredictable stress placement, which shifts between forms and changes vowel pronunciation.
- Consonant palatalisation, a systematic hard/soft distinction English lacks.
Cards you might meet
Generated from whatever theme you name — these are the kind of thing that comes back.
тоска
a heavy spiritual longing
Nabokov wrote at length about its untranslatability.
успевать
to manage to do something in time
обязательно
definitely, without fail
получается
it turns out; it works
запомнить
to memorise, to commit to memory
Russian conjugation drills
Name a verb, pick the tenses, and get five fill-in-the-blank sentences with every answer marked — including near-misses where only an accent is wrong. Available tenses:
PresentPastFutureImperativePerfective PresentPerfective Future
What you get
- SM-2 scheduling with four grades and keyboard shortcuts
- Generated Russian vocabulary on any theme you name
- Pronunciation for every card
- Conjugation drills across 6 tenses
- Writing feedback on your own sentences
- Photo vocabulary — name what is in front of you
Popular Russian themes
everyday lifeliteraturetravelworkfood
Russian questions
- Do I need Cyrillic before starting?
- Yes, and it takes very little time — a few hours gets you reading slowly, and reading speed comes with exposure. Romanised Russian is a dead end that entrenches wrong pronunciation.
- Which Russian verb forms does the drill cover?
- Present, past, future and imperative, plus perfective present and perfective future — so aspect pairs can be practised directly rather than as an afterthought.
- How hard is Russian for English speakers?
- The Foreign Service Institute places it a category above the Romance languages, at roughly 1,100 class hours. The case system front-loads the difficulty, much as it does in German but more so.