MGU Russian language centre

🇷🇺Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, South Korea, Italy. Six countries, one group, and by now they're holding conversations in Russian with each other. The next beginner course starts on 26 October. It's an A1 course from absolute zero, no alphabet needed beforehand, classes Monday to Thursday from 10am to 2pm with native teachers in small groups. If you're not in Moscow, the online beginner group starts the same day, so you can join from anywhere. What surprises people is the group itself. Everyone arrives with a different native language, so Russian quickly becomes the only thing you have in common, and you start using it on each other. The trial lesson is free if you'd rather see it first. Sign up here!

Funny pics of the week 🪁

🎂Today is a special day for our centre! It is the birthday of our beloved teacher Olga Borisovna Antoshkina! Olga Borisovna is not only a wonderful educator but also the author of the amazing “Russia — My Love” teaching series for Russian as a Foreign Language, which helps international students from all over the world discover the Russian language and culture from scratch. To mark the occasion, international students recorded a touching video greeting! Watch how warmly and lovingly they speak the Russian language—a language they mastered thanks to Olga Borisovna! Happy birthday, dear Teacher! We wish you inspiration, talented students, and continued creative success! You can learn more about the textbook and order it on the official “Russia — My Love” website.

New vocabulary 🇷🇺🇷🇺

🖊️"How do I learn Russian cursive?" comes up as soon as someone sees a handwritten note and realises it looks nothing like the alphabet they studied. The first thing worth knowing is that this isn't optional decoration. Russians write in cursive by default, every school teaches it, and printed letterforms are almost never used by hand. Start by learning to read it before you try to write it. Find a handwritten sample, sit with it, and work out which shapes correspond to which letters. The trouble spots are predictable: и, ш, м, л and т all dissolve into rows of identical humps, which is why a word like «лишишь» can look like a heartbeat monitor. Then write by hand daily, in small amounts. Ten minutes copying real sentences beats an hour of drilling single letters, because cursive is about how letters join, not how they look alone. Children's copybooks, called прописи, are cheap and genuinely the fastest route..

🐐«Любовь зла, полюбишь и козла» is a funny Russian proverb about how love can make us overlook someone’s flaws. The literal meaning is something like “Love is blind, you might even fall for a goat.” The “goat” is not really about the animal. It is a humorous way of saying that when you fall in love, even a person with plenty of flaws can suddenly seem wonderful. Russians usually say this phrase jokingly, when someone falls for a person others don’t quite understand. It can be teasing, affectionate, or slightly ironic depending on the situation.

Have you ever noticed that you sound much better in your head than you do in real life?🧐 When you’re learning a foreign language, you can sometimes imagine yourself speaking fluently, using the right words and forming perfect sentences. Then you actually start talking, and suddenly there are pauses, missing words, strange grammar and a lot of «uhm… » It happens because speaking in your head is much easier than speaking out loud. Your brain already knows what you want to say, so it fills in the gaps and makes everything sound smoother. But real conversation requires you to find the words, build the sentence and pronounce everything at the same time. So if your spoken language doesn’t sound as good as it does in your head, it doesn’t mean you’re bad at the language. Your speaking skills just need time to catch up with the version of you that already exists in your head. 🇷🇺 Join the new group for beginners to feel more confident in yourself and your Russian! We start on September 28th! Click here to sign up!

Most people begin learning Russian by opening a grammar table and closing it again a week later. Here’s an order that works better. 1. The alphabet, three days, nothing else. Not words yet. Just until you can read a street sign slowly. 2. Read everything you see, badly. Shop names, metro stations, food labels. Understanding nothing is fine. You’re teaching your eyes that Cyrillic isn’t decoration. 3. Whole phrases before rules. «Меня зовут», «я не понимаю», «сколько стоит». Don’t ask why the endings look like that yet. 4. Pick your first 100 words from your own life. Textbooks give you «aunt» and «pencil». Yours should match why you’re actually learning. 5. Only now touch the cases. Start with two, not six. Six at once is what makes people quit. 6. Speak far earlier than feels comfortable. Three broken sentences with a real person beats an hour of flashcards. Step six is the one nobody manages alone, which is where a teacher earns their keep. Ours do this every week with people starting from zero, so if you’d rather not guess at the order yourself, come and start with us.

Peterhof sits on the Gulf of Finland, about 30 kilometres west of St Petersburg, and it was Peter the Great’s answer to Versailles. Built from 1714, it does something Versailles doesn’t: the Grand Cascade below the palace runs on no pumps at all. Water arrives by gravity through a canal system engineered three hundred years ago, and it has been working ever since. There are around 150 fountains across the park, and the ones people remember are the ones that misbehave. Peter installed trick fountains that soak you when you step on the wrong stone, and they still catch visitors out. Come in mid May for the ceremonial switching on, when the water is turned on for the season and crowds gather to watch it start. Go once if you can. It was almost completely destroyed in the war and rebuilt from photographs and memory over decades, which means what you’re looking at is not only Peter’s ambition but the stubbornness of everyone who put it back.

23 August 1943 marks the end of the Battle of Kursk. Both sides knew it was coming: the front line had left a huge Soviet-held bulge pushing westwards, some 250 kilometres wide, and it was the obvious place for a German offensive. So instead of striking first, Soviet command chose to dig in, building eight successive defensive belts, thousands of kilometres of trenches, and minefields laid several times denser than standard. Around 300,000 civilians built those defences, mostly women and teenagers from the surrounding villages, digging by hand through the spring. Some of them were still there when the offensive began on 5 July. The fighting lasted fifty days, and by the end the Soviet side had lost well over 800,000 men killed, wounded or missing, more in under two months than Britain lost in the entire war. Kursk itself, and the towns around it, were left with barely a roof standing. That's why the date carries what it carries. Before Kursk the initiative on the Eastern Front had shifted back and forth. After it never returned to the German side. Nearly every Russian family has someone in those two months, a name, a photograph, a letter that stopped arriving, and that's what people are thinking about today, rather than the maps and the tank counts.

Here's a small thing that unsettles English speakers early on: in the Russian past tense, the verb tells you the gender of whoever did it. Take читать, to read. Drop the -ть, add an ending: читал — a man read читала — a woman read читало — an it read читали — they read, or a group of any kind So «я читал» and «я читала» are both "I was reading." The difference is who's speaking. The good news is that this is easier than what English does, not harder. Russian past tense has no я/ты/он conjugation at all — you don't change the verb for person. One form covers я, ты and он. Compare that to present tense, where every pronoun gets its own ending. Two things worth knowing. Вы always takes the plural form, even when you're speaking to one person politely. «Вы читали?» — whether that's a room full of people or your professor.And gender agreement follows the noun, not the meaning. Письмо пришло, because письмо is neuter. Книга лежала на столе, because книга is feminine. The object doesn't have a gender in any real sense — the word does. Small test: if a woman says «я устала» and a man says «я устал», they're both saying "I'm tired." Which one would you use?

How our flag has changed over the years!🇷🇺

Today is Russia’s Flag Day, so here’s the short history behind the three stripes 🇷🇺 The white-blue-red tricolour goes back to Peter the Great, who adopted it in the 1690s for the merchant fleet after studying shipbuilding in the Netherlands. The Dutch flag has the same three colours in a different order — the resemblance isn’t a coincidence. For most of the following centuries it shared the stage with the black-yellow-white imperial flag, and then disappeared entirely under the Soviet red banner. It came back on 22 August 1991, which is the date the holiday marks. The proportions were finalised later, in 1993. As for what the colours mean — officially, nothing. There’s no state interpretation. The popular readings you’ll hear (white for nobility, blue for faithfulness, red for courage) are folk explanations that accumulated over time, and Russians will happily give you three different versions. A useful word for today: флаг is the everyday one, but you’ll also see знамя — a banner, heavier and more ceremonial, the kind carried rather than flown.

🇷🇺Russian is having a bigger moment than people realise! Russian universities enrolled 422,000 international students in 2025 — up from 389,000 the year before and 351,500 in 2022. Three straight years of growth, mostly medicine and engineering. Those students learn the language the best possible way: fast, spoken, because they need it by Tuesday. Part of the appeal is reach. Russian works as a second language across Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Baltics — learn it once and it travels much further than one border. Then there's the group no statistics catch: people who understood their grandmother perfectly but always answered in English. People who married into a Russian-speaking family and got tired of smiling politely through dinner. Not chasing a career, just closing a gap.🇷🇺 And if the difficulty worries you — the Foreign Service Institute's famous 1,012 hours measures diplomatic-level fluency. Reading a menu, following a song, talking to your partner's parents comes far sooner. So which group are you in?🇷🇺

Russian has six cases, and if you want a shortcut, skip ahead to the genitive. It's the one that unlocks the most.It covers possession, where English would use "of" or an apostrophe — книга брата, центр города. And absence: нет времени, нет денег, нет проблем. Then there are numbers, where it depends on the last digit: 2, 3, 4 and anything ending in them — genitive singular: два дня, тридцать четыре дня. 5 through 20, and anything ending in 5–9 or 0 — genitive plural: пять дней, сто дней. 11–14 are the exception: always genitive plural, whatever the last digit suggests. It also follows много, мало, and a long list of prepositions: без сахара, для тебя, из Москвы. The endings take time to stick. But noticing when you need this case is half the work. Which use still catches you out? P.S. Spelling rule. After г, к, х, ж, ч, ш, щ you write -и instead of -ы: книга → книги, not книгы. Fill vowel. When a feminine or neuter word loses its ending in the plural, a vowel often appears to break up the consonants: окно → окон, сестра → сестёр, письмо → писем

Viktor Tsoi was the voice of a generation — the frontman of Кино and probably the most loved Russian rock musician there's ever been. On August 15, 1990, he died in a car crash in Latvia. He was 28. Thirty-six years on, people still come to the Tsoi Wall on Arbat every year on that date. Flowers, guitars, someone playing «Группа крови» badly and everyone singing along anyway. Here's why he matters if you're learning Russian: his lyrics are plain. Short lines, ordinary words, nothing to decode. That's rare in music, and it makes Кино one of the easiest ways into the language. The graffiti on that wall reads Цой жив — Tsoi is alive. You'll find it spray-painted in cities across the country, decades later. Start with «Звезда по имени Солнце». Slow, clear, and the vocabulary is genuinely worth knowing. What was the first Russian song you fell for?

If you visit a Russian house you may notice something unusual: people often avoid shaking hands or greeting each other while standing on opposite sides of the doorway. Why? The answer goes back to an old belief that the threshold was a special boundary. It separated the safe space of the home from the outside world, and in traditional culture it was associated with various spirits, rituals and protective customs. Because of this, important actions, including greetings and farewells, were not supposed to happen across the threshold. Today, of course, most Russians don't literally believe that something bad will happen if they shake hands over the threshold. But the superstition has survived as a familiar cultural habit. Someone might simply say: «Не через порог!» and invite you to come inside first. It's one of those old beliefs that has become part of everyday etiquette, even for people who don't consider themselves superstitious.

At first glance, «очень» and «слишком» look almost identical. Both make an adjective stronger, so many Russian learners use them interchangeably. But they express two very different ideas. Use «очень» when you simply want to emphasize something. It has a positive or neutral meaning and is the equivalent of very: «мне очень нравится Москва» (I really like Moscow), «сегодня очень тепло» (It's very warm today), «этот фильм очень интересный» (This film is very interesting). «Слишком» is different. It means that something has gone beyond a comfortable or acceptable limit. In English, it's usually translated as too: «сегодня слишком жарко» (It's too hot today), «этот чемодан слишком тяжёлый» (This suitcase is too heavy), «ты говоришь слишком быстро» (You speak too fast). In all of these examples, the speaker isn't just describing something. They're saying it's more than they would like. A simple way to remember the difference is this: «очень» makes something stronger, while «слишком» suggests there's a problem because there's too much of it.

💐Buying flowers in Russia? There's one small detail that surprises almost every foreign visitor. For celebrations, Russians usually give an odd number of flowers: 1, 3, 5, 7, and so on. Bouquets with an even numberare traditionally associated with funerals and memorial ceremonies, so they're not given for birthdays, dates, or other happy occasions. The type of flower matters too. Red roses are often associated with romance, white lilies are a popular choice for weddings, and tulips become especially popular in spring, particularly around 8 March, International Women's Day. If you're not sure what to choose, a bouquet of fresh seasonal flowers with an odd number of stems is always a safe choice. It's a small cultural detail, but knowing it can help you avoid an awkward situation and make a great impression.

One of the easiest mistakes to make in Russian is mixing up знать and уметь. Both can be translated as «to know», but they mean different things. Use знать when you’re talking about knowledge: Я знаю русский язык. — I know Russian. Ты знаешь этого человека? — Do you know this person? Use уметь when you’re talking about a skill or ability: Я умею плавать. — I can swim. Она умеет готовить. — She knows how to cook. A simple way to remember it: знать = to know уметь = to know how / to be able to Save to remember!!!