Alphabet first — it's a weekend, not a mountain. Then 300 everyday words and the present tense. Don't touch the cases until month two. That's the whole plan; here's why it works.
Published 12 June 2026
Tom here. A reader called Dan emailed me last week: "You did Serbian. I want Russian. Same plan?" Mostly, yes — and where it differs, it differs in ways nobody warned me about either. So this is the answer I sent him, tidied up.
Russian Cyrillic has 33 letters, and you already know more of them than you think. Six look and sound like English (М, К, Т, А, О, Е — near enough). About ten are traps: В is v, Н is n, Р is r, С is s. The genuinely new ones — Ж, Ш, Щ, Ы, Ю, Я — are a short evening of practice each.
The fastest method is reading loanwords, because they self-check: ресторан (restoran), метро, кофе, такси. If your sounding-out produces a word you recognise, you got the letters right. I did exactly this for Serbian Cyrillic and it transfers almost wholesale — the two alphabets share most of their letters.
One weekend. Don't buy an alphabet course. Don't spend three weeks on it. It's a door, not a room.
Word frequency in Russian is brutally top-heavy: a few hundred words cover the bulk of everyday speech. Start with the concrete stuff — хлеб (bread), вода (water), дом (house) — which, if you've touched any Slavic language, will feel like meeting cousins. Serbian has hleb, voda, dom. Same roots, centuries apart.
The thing Serbian did not prepare me for: Russian vowels change when unstressed. Молоко (milk) is spelled with three o's and pronounced roughly "malakó". And the stress isn't written down, and it moves. You handle this the boring way — learn each word with its stress, out loud, from audio. Silent vocabulary lists will quietly teach you wrong.
Get the present tense of a dozen common verbs under your fingers early: я говорю (I speak), ты говоришь (you speak), я работаю (I work). The endings follow patterns, and once you have "I" and "you" forms you can actually exchange sentences with a human — which matters more for staying motivated than any amount of grammar theory.
My rule from Serbian still stands: if a week goes by where you learned grammar but said nothing out loud, the week didn't count.
Russian has six cases (one fewer than Serbian — it's mostly dropped the vocative). Everyone's instinct is to print the full declension table and memorise it. Don't. That table is a reference document, not a syllabus.
From month two, meet one case at a time inside real sentences: accusative first (я пью кофе — I drink coffee), then prepositional for saying where things are, then genitive. Each one is a job label — who's doing what to whom — and in sentences the logic shows itself. In tables it never does. If you want the gentler version of this argument, I've made it before about learning Serbian, and it goes double for Russian.
The FSI budgets around 1,100 classroom hours for Russian — the same bucket as Serbo-Croatian. That number sounds grim until you remember it describes diplomats cramming full-time. At a steady 25 focused minutes a day, the honest early milestones are the same as for any Slavic language: survival basics in two or three months, real conversations inside a year. Spaced repetition is what keeps those 300 words from leaking out the back while you pour more in the front.
Do I need cursive? No — see above. Is Russian harder than Spanish? Longer, not harder: more new systems to install, none of them individually vicious. Can I learn Russian on Gora? Not yet — Montenegrin is live and Serbian is next, with Russian on the roadmap. The method (sounds first, words with audio, one case at a time, speaking from day one) is exactly what this post is describing, so if a Balkan language is anywhere on your list, start there and your Russian will thank you later.