This is a blog of one author. The blog is devoted totally to learning Russian language.
Russian is a language used in Russia :-) In addition to this obvious fact you might know that the language is, according to Wikipedia, an official language in 13 countries. And it also is widely used in several other countries, mostly in the territory of the former USSR.
Elderly people in the countries which belonged to the Soviet world used to learn Russian at school. When I was in Albania, I met a number of people who learned it either, or whose parents were in close relation to Russian language at their job.
Russian is my native tongue, so I may assure you that all the Russian you meet here on this website is correct. Please don't be confused by possible mistakes, erros and typos in English explanations and don't hesitage to correct me in that. I also understand Ukrainian and some Belarusian, and am in the process of learning German and Italian currently.
Russian language is one of those which does not have dialects gone too far from each other. That means that if you speak any Russian, you will be clearly understood in any part of the country. There are multiple regional variants of how to pronunce vowels, or how to stress words, or even which word to chose for particular things, but in general those differencies are non significant and are vanishingly small.
I live in Moscow, the capital of Russia, and the sounds used here tend to be more open and long. People from internal parts of the continent, rather, speak a bit closer to what is written. And yes, Russian is a language where you don't need to learn rules of reading. As soon as you become recognize the letters, you can read. Almost as easy like in Finnish, for example. Although there are no way to learn out from written text which syllable is under the stress: you always have to remember it or have to consult the dictionary (but don't be afraid: often it is possible to spread the knowledge of the stressing in words already been learned).
In this blog I would like to make two types of postings. The first one is a series of signs and labels which you may encounter with in the city. The other one will be about the language itself, its grammar and structure. Your feedback in the comments here or direct to my e-mail address mail@andy.sh will be very helpful.
Good luck with learning Russian.
Andrew Shitov.
