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Learn Russian
Russian sounds intimidating until you hear it in context. Real movie clips connect Cyrillic letters to actual spoken words.
Russian sounds intimidating until you hear it in context. Real movie clips connect Cyrillic letters to actual spoken words.
Russian opens the door to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov in their original language. Translations always lose something.
Russia spans a massive territory, and Russian is widely understood in former Soviet countries. That gives you access to conversations across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.
Russia has a strong tradition in mathematics, physics, and engineering. Knowing Russian lets you read original research papers and connect with developers in a thriving tech community.
Learn Russian from 15,000+ clips from movies and shows you actually want to watch.
Hear something new? You'll never miss a word again.
Quick challenges using the scenes you just watched.
Every clip is a mini lesson. The more you watch, the more you know.
10 Best Movies and TV Shows to Learn Russian
Read our movie and TV guide →
Spend your first week just learning to read Cyrillic letters. Many look like Latin letters but sound different. Once you crack the alphabet, subtitles suddenly become readable and everything speeds up.
Russian verbs come in perfective and imperfective pairs. When you hear a verb in a Wordy clip, tap it to check which form it is. This distinction changes meaning completely, and movies show you the difference in action.
Russian has six grammatical cases, and memorizing declension tables gets boring fast. Instead, pay attention to how characters use prepositions and endings in real sentences. Wordy's clip-based approach gives you that repeated exposure, and your brain picks up patterns faster from real sentences than from charts.
Russian has no word for "the" or "a." There are no articles at all, which makes sentence structure feel very different from English (Oxford Reference, Russian Grammar).
The Russian word for "bear" (medved) literally translates to "honey knower," because ancient Slavs avoided saying the animal's real name out of superstition (Vasmer's Etymological Dictionary).
Cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are required to learn Russian, since key spacecraft controls and manuals are written in it (NASA Astronaut Training Program).
