Welcome to Russian A1. By the end of this course, you'll be able to greet people confidently at any time of day, introduce yourself, talk about your family, and describe what your friends do for work. You will build practical speaking skills you can use straight away in real conversations, without getting tangled up in complex grammar charts. With Auracle, you build towards fluency by speaking out loud constantly and using active recall to make each new phrase automatic. Auracle schedules reviews of what you've learned to help you remember it over time. Let's get started.

Before we jump into conversations, we need to tune your ear to the rhythm and key sounds of Russian. Russian pronunciation is wonderfully melodic, but it has a few sounds and vowel shifts that work quite differently from British English. Mastering these now will make you instantly understood and help you catch words much more easily when native speakers talk. Here's a tip if you want to just hear the native pronunciation audio over and over again: visit the deck's page and press the answer audio button on each card as many times as you like.

In Russian, word stress changes the sound of vowels dramatically. The letter O is only pronounced as a full 'O' when it carries the stress. When unstressed, it relaxes into an 'a' sound, much like the first sound in 'about'. You can hear this in 'окно', the Russian word for 'window'. The stress falls on the second syllable, so the first letter O sounds like 'a': 'ak-NO'. Listen and copy: 'окно'.

Russian has a distinctive vowel sound written as the letter Ы, which has no equivalent in English. In writing, it looks like a number six followed by an upright line. To produce it, put your mouth in position to say 'ee' as in 'see', but pull your tongue straight back into the centre of your mouth without rounding your lips. You can hear this deep vowel in 'мы', the Russian word for 'we'. Listen and copy: 'мы'.