Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.
Nobody becomes conversational in Russian in six months, and nobody fails to either. Both are true, and which one describes you depends on a word nobody puts in the question.
Two students, six months each, opposite results
Conversational about what. That is the whole article, and everything below is the consequence.
A student of mine could hold a fifteen-minute conversation about her work at month five and could not buy a train ticket at month eight. I can explain my job and I can’t get to it, she said. Another ordered confidently in restaurants by March and went silent the first time somebody asked him about his weekend. Nobody teaches you the small talk, he told me, which is true and also a choice he had made without noticing.
Six months buys you a shape, not a level. What you choose determines the shape.
The number of hours Russian takes to reach professional proficiency is genuinely large and worth knowing, and it isn’t the number that decides what your six months look like.Month one, and the part that is easier than advertised
Two weeks for the alphabet, and then it stops being a topic. Thirty-three letters, most behaving predictably, plus the small group that borrow a familiar shape and mean something else entirely. I thought that would be the wall, one student told me at the end of her second week, which is what almost everybody says. The wall is further in and looks nothing like a wall.What month one is actually for is the sound of the language in your mouth. Not vocabulary, not grammar. The physical business of producing consonant clusters your tongue has never attempted, and doing it out loud, daily, badly.
Learners who skip this and go straight to words carry the deficit for years, because a sound you have never produced correctly is one you cannot hear correctly either.
Months two and three, and the trade you have to make
Here is the fork, and it is the only decision in this article that matters, because everything after month three follows from it and switching later costs you a month.
You can spend these months building broad shallow coverage: greetings, numbers, directions, food, weather. Or you can spend them building one narrow deep channel: your job, your field, the thing you would talk about at a party.
| Choice | At month six you can | You cannot |
|---|---|---|
| Broad and shallow | Handle transactions in most situations | Say anything you actually think |
| Narrow and deep | Hold a conversation on one subject | Buy a train ticket without preparing |
Breadth produces a tourist. Depth produces somebody worth talking to about one thing.
My advice is depth for adults and breadth for anybody about to travel. Pick the one you would actually talk about, I tell people in the first lesson, because choosing now is easier than switching in month four.Months four and five, where the grammar arrives late on purpose
Cases are usually taught first and understood last, which is the wrong order for anything you intend to speak rather than read, and it is why so many people arrive at a lesson able to recite a table they cannot use.
By month four you have said several hundred sentences aloud and got a fair number of them wrong. That is the condition under which case endings stop being a table and start being a repair. You have already felt the sentence go wrong; now you learn why.
It finally sounds like something instead of a chart, a student wrote to me in his fifth month, and he had been drilling those same endings since week three without them landing. Verbal aspect belongs here too, and it is the one thing I would not attempt to shortcut. Most verbs arrive in pairs, and the choice turns on whether you are presenting the action as complete, not on when it took place.What the sixth month actually looks like
Not fluency and not confidence. What you get is a specific and quite narrow ability, and it beats the broad vague one people imagine having by a margin that surprises them.
Expect to hold a conversation with a patient person about the subject you chose, at a pace slower than theirs, with mistakes they can hear and ignore. You’ll lose the thread when three people talk at once. You will understand more than you can produce by a wide margin, which is normal and stays true for years.
A conversation you can only have slowly is still a conversation.
The people who reach that point have almost always been speaking out loud with somebody, weekly, since about month two. The ones who arrive at month six having done everything alone can usually read and cannot talk, and they are the harder case to fix.Whatever routine got them there is the routine that hid the gap.
The six months I wasted, and what fixed them
I learned English the way this article recommends against, and I had what looked to me at twenty-two like an excellent reason. For my first half-year I studied silently. Grammar exercises, reading, vocabulary lists, and not one sentence produced out loud where anybody could hear it, because I was a teacher-in-training and being bad at it in front of witnesses seemed unaffordable. At the end of it I could read a newspaper and couldn’t ask for directions. The reading has served me ever since, and I’m still glad of it. The six months of silence cost me about a year of speaking, and I have never met a student who saved time by making the same trade. What fixed it was the thing this article keeps recommending. A colleague who refused to switch to Russian with me, once a week, for a year, and who was patient in the specific way that has nothing to do with kindness.You cannot practice being understood alone.
At Palme School we teach adults online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. You can book those here, and there are printable materials for learners in our resource library.Frequently asked questions
You can reach a conversation that actually goes somewhere, on one subject you chose deliberately, at a slow pace, with mistakes. You cannot reach general fluency, and anybody promising it is selling something.
The alphabet, which takes two weeks, and then the sounds, out loud and daily. Vocabulary can wait two weeks; pronunciation habits formed in silence are expensive to undo.
Five to seven, of which at least one must involve speaking to a person. Ten hours a week with no speaking will produce a reader, not a talker.
Speaking, and let the grammar arrive around month four when you have enough wrong sentences behind you for the rules to be repairs rather than abstractions.
Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Conversation school · Free materials
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.
