About

The purpose of this blog is to help, or even inspire, those who are interested in the Russian language. And even those who are generally interested in Slavic languages.

I’m neither a native speaker of Russian, nor a certified teacher. My only educational experience is comprised of getting an education-related university degree and then working in a school environment as a teacher’s aide for some years.

I began learning Russian in July 2012. It was a little rough in the beginning, especially because I noticed there were far fewer quality resources in this language compared to other more popular languages. Also, I studied it without any audio, so my pronunciation was terrible.

They say Russian grammar is complex and that Russian is an extremely difficult language. But is it really? I think any language can be mastered with relative ease if you have the passion and motivation to learn it. As for what I’ve experienced with it, sometimes it’s very complex, but sometimes it’s relatively easy. It’s a little bit of both, I’d say.

Within a couple days of studying this wonderful language, I grew to love it. From that point on, I made it a goal of mine to reach full proficiency in it someday. I actually don’t like to use the word fluent, because when people use it, they think perfection. And no one is perfect. You could be fluent in a language and still make mistakes every now and then. It happens.

Back to learning Russian, since there were far fewer quality resources, I had to dig deep to find answers to questions I had, because I had many. And I interacted with many native speakers. Some of them really helped push me forward in the language by correcting my mistakes and helping me phrase my sentences in the true Russian way.

As I learned new things from textbooks, Internet forums and native speakers, I kept notebooks, both digital and physical, in which I jotted down all my discoveries.

It was then in 2014 that the idea hit me to start making lessons to help others learn this beautiful language.

And in 2016, when I was already at an advanced level, I started churning out lessons in my free time.

But it took a long time to construct everything into bit-by-bit lessons for future learners of Russian. In fact, I’m still making constant changes to lessons I wrote years ago.

And finally, in late 2023, I started up this blog and have been publishing lessons and Russian grammar topics ever since.

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Be a faithful follower and watch as this blog expands into a great resource. It will get there; all in good time!

If you want to learn a little more about me, read on, beyond the line.

If you would like to contact me, please write to me here.

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Do I plan on becoming a certified teacher? Probably not. Here in the United States to become a teacher, you need a 4-year degree [I have], then you must do 1 year of teaching classes and do student teaching, which is NOT paid. If I were in my 20s, yes, without a doubt. I’m not that young anymore, making working for free just not feasible.

But I still love education. It was always in me, still is, and always will be. I think I can achieve that dream through this blog.

Some [perhaps] helpful advice for you:

Fluency is any language is only achieved when you stop being afraid to make mistakes and become bold enough to take risks.

Books and other educational materials give you the words and phrases to get you going, but they won’t make you fluent. To achieve it, you need to USE the language.

You want to improve speaking and accent? Speak more!

You want to improve spelling and writing? Write more!

You want to improve listening and oral comprehension? Listen more!
You want to improve reading comprehension? Read more!

Seems easy, but it took me some time before I realized these things.