Red Kalinka
Red Kalinka, the largest Russian school in the world, offers video courses, books, lessons via Skype, audiobooks, as well as online practice exercises to students located in more than 90 countries. When a learner signs up for its self paced video course, (which includes more than 160, 30-minute videos, learning materials, audio recordings, practice exercises, and grammar tables), costing about 29 Euros per month they get a personal tutor assigned to them who can answer their questions via email. These are a team of 20 native speakers that are trained on Red Kalinka’s inhouse training system.
Learners are offered with options such as:
- Book a trial lesson for one euro.
- Take lessons for seven days and opt for a refund.
- If not pleased with the system. Red Kalinka also offers private lessons via Skype.
A 50-minute lesson costs 19 euros, but you get discounted lessons if you buy a package of five, 10, 20, 30, or 40 lessons.
Russian for Free
Russian for Free is a website where you can access a lot of self-paced Russian language learning materials, such as audio material, texts and dialogues for listening practice, audio files with Russian phrases for many types of situations, and videos and tables with grammar explanations and practice exercises, at no extra cost. Russian for free offers three courses namely: Learn to read, learn to speak, and Russian cases, meant to help beginners learn the basics of Russian and help them advance to an intermediate level. If you’re looking to start learning Russian on your own, Russian for Free would be a great place to start.
Rocket Russian
Cost: Starts from $99.95 (auto-applied discount)
Rocket languages offer a comprehensive structured Russian language course with a very clear linear progression, that covers all 4 major skills evenly (listening, speaking, reading, writing) marked on an inbuilt leaderboard. The course provides a lot of freedom to the learner to skip and learn content if required, without creating an obligation to follow a specific learning path. It offers crisp audio lessons in a podcast-style format that are easy to follow, sans the filler content along with their inbuilt voice recognition(uses Google’s Web Speech technology) that’s extremely accurate.
Pimsleur Russian
Cost: $14.95 a month subscription (or $119.95 per level).
Pimsleur is a timeless masterpiece that teaches using spaced repetition recall.
Lessons conducted for 30 minutes in a day focus on practical vocabulary and expressions one might need in various scenarios, such as common greetings, common phrases, and vocabulary. There is a lot of listening and repeating phrases for easy memorization
It is an affordable program that can be subscribed to or the full program which includes 30 lessons bought for $119.95.
Grammar Hero (Russian)
Cost: $197
Grammar Hero course uses story-based instruction to simplify difficult-to-grasp grammatical concepts in Russian, taking a learner through commonly experienced problems with Russian grammar carefully.
It indeed does a great job of simplifying Russian grammatical concepts besides addressing most of the questions new learners have before learning a language.
While Grammar Hero offers good quality, custom-written reading material it may be a little too to heavy on the grammar and a bit overpriced.
Rosetta Stone Russian
Cost: Starts at $6.49 a month.
Rosetta Stone used to be an expensive boxed product but now offers an affordable online subscription. It eliminates the need to memorize long rules and words with its unique learning style that intuitively promotes learning Russian through simple language patterns at a lower subscription cost. The strength of Rosetta lies in its unique immersion process. Since there is no translation or explicit grammar, you must learn vocabulary, grammar and speaking skills through intuition or couple with other online available resources
Mango Languages
Cost: $7.99 a month
Mango’s intuitive ‘chunking’ interface is one of the best implementations I’ve ever seen in a language product, that avoids heavy grammar explanations and instead highlights lexical chunks in colors to help learners learn language patterns. Inexpensive, beautifully designed and a pleasure to use, Mango courses lack depth in the content and prompt learners to seek an alternative learning resource.
Mondly Russian
Cost: Starts at $9.99/month.
Mondly provides courses similar in style to Busuu, Duolingo, and Babbel, including hints of Rosetta Stone in its delivery! While it’s a beautifully designed web app that is a sheer pleasure to navigate the interface itself is not very user friendly or appealing. While Mondly offers great learning with a lot of vocabulary that’s drilled effectively, daily lessons, weekly quizzes, monthly challenges it lacks the power to attract learners who learn better with better order of lessons, well-designed topics and innovative content and active exercises! It encourages learners to practice daily.
Multibhashi
Cost: Starts at INR 4599 for 30 classes of 30 minutes each
Multibhashi is a Technology platform that imparts impactful content designed by its empanelled Linguist experts across major Indian languages imparted via Cloud LMS, Cloud telephony, Streaming Video, Realtime Chat, Experiential Learning, Gamification & Interactive evaluation leading to Adaptive Learning by the user. In November 2020, HolonIQ – an authority when it comes to performing and buddying EdTechs, announced its first annual India and South Asia EdTech 100 — a list of the 100 most promising education technology startups across the region from approximately 3000 EdTech teams based in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. And Multibhashi bagged a position in the top 100 Edtech companies in Asia and ONLY ONE FROM INDIA in the Language learning category to be part of HOLONIQ. Multibhashi offers pocket-friendly courses via customized online learning, that’s flexible and allows you to take classes at the convenience of your home, with qualified trainers that are certified Level B2 and above, with diverse experience, having helped thousands of learners who help you improve in the subject by consistently monitoring your progress through pre-assessment, mid-assessment and post-assessment.
