Before any of this there was a cassette
My first year teaching English in Russia, back in 2011, the technology in the room was a cassette, borrowed from a colleague on Tuesdays, with one dialogue on it in which two people booked a hotel room. I rewound it by hand with a pencil, which is a skill I have not needed since.
So when parents ask whether an app can replace me, the question doesn’t offend me. I’d have taken it.
The girl who drilled for three months
One of my students, whose details I have changed here as I do everywhere, spent a winter drilling with a chatbot, an hour most evenings, and her written Russian improved visibly. Cases, aspect, word order. Then her aunt called from Yekaterinburg. She got through two sentences, hit a question she knew the answer to, said ne znayu, «I don’t know,» and passed the phone along. Nothing she had drilled was wasted. It just hadn’t been the thing that was missing.
The chatbot line is the one I’d underline. Something that never tires and never judges is useful, and my students use it for an hour at a stretch, which no human tutor could sit through.
What it cannot do is want the answer.
Whether a person speaks up at all turns on their own estimate of how they are doing, not on their actual ability, an argument MacIntyre and colleagues laid out in 1998, and nothing since has shifted it. A grandmother waiting for a real answer moves a child. A model waiting for input does not, because the child knows the difference.
The feature lists do not mention Russian
Parents ask me about apps every week. The question underneath is always the same: can this replace a teacher, or at least the cost of one. Which makes it worth knowing what these tools actually cover. The conversation features everyone means when they say AI, the ones where you talk and something talks back, do not exist for Russian.
Duolingo’s own page lists Video Call for Max subscribers learning English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese, with Japanese and Korean on iOS only. The page has promised more courses «in the coming months» since it went up, and those months have been running a while now. Separately, nine courses were extended to upper-intermediate level in April 2026. Russian is on neither list.
A child learning Russian therefore gets the ordinary course, which in my experience takes an adult to about the level of a confident tourist. Real progress for someone starting from nothing. Nowhere near enough for a child who grew up hearing Russian at home, understands every word on a phone call, and cannot answer.
| What it does for Russian | Where it stops | |
|---|---|---|
| Duolingo | Free, gamified, good on Cyrillic and early vocabulary | No conversation features, no upper-intermediate content |
| Babbel | Structured lessons with real grammar explanation | Courses to A1, extra topics to A2, the lowest ceiling of their thirteen languages |
| Chatbots | Endless patient practice, instant correction | No stakes, no memory of your child |
Tool availability checked September 1, 2026. This is the part of the article that will age fastest.
Which makes the headline at the top of this page a question rather than a promise: for most languages AI has changed a great deal, and for ours it changed the drill, left the conversation alone, and never mentioned which of the two it was selling.
Nothing on the market holds a conversation in Russian.
Duolingo’s conversation character is called Lily too, incidentally. Purple, moody, no relation.
Use the apps for drill: letters, vocabulary, the endless case endings. Bring in a human for the part where someone has to care what your child says. Our conversation school exists for exactly that, and our lessons for bilingual kids open with an assessment of where a child actually is.
Frequently asked questions
For drilling, Duolingo and Babbel work, and a chatbot handles unlimited written practice. For conversation, nothing on the market currently runs in Russian.
Duolingo is free and better on the alphabet. Babbel explains grammar and costs money. Neither takes a learner past the intermediate plateau, and for a child who grew up hearing Russian at home, that plateau is where the real work starts.
Not for the part that matters. Apps handle recognition and recall. What these children lack is the nerve to speak in front of someone, and that gets built by other people.
Sources
- Babbel. (2026). Available languages. Retrieved September 1, 2026. support.babbel.com
- Duolingo. (2026, April). Duolingo course content can take you to B2 proficiency. Retrieved September 1, 2026. blog.duolingo.com
- Duolingo. Video Call. Retrieved September 1, 2026. blog.duolingo.com
- MacIntyre, P. D., Clément, R., Dörnyei, Z., & Noels, K. A. (1998). Conceptualizing willingness to communicate in a L2: A situational model of L2 confidence and affiliation. The Modern Language Journal, 82(4), 545–562. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Palme School: Conversation school · Russian for bilingual children · Free materials for parents
Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.
