For me, Russian is intimidating. This is coming from someone whose first earnest (and successful) attempt at learning a foreign language was Japanese. Perhaps stemming from my love of the culture and many bits of media I could use to fuel my drive to keep learning, Japanese was a tedious but relatively easy language for me to learn.

I started on Norwegian next, and I'm about an A2-B1 (around intermediate) level in that language. It's so similar to English that the biggest challenge in learning it was simply remembering all the vocabulary. It still used the Latin alphabet with only a couple of letters that took me all of a few minutes to become familiar with, was grammatically similar to English, and the accent was fairly easy for me, seeing as how I'm a native Minnesotan.

While I'm still learning Norwegian (do we ever really stop learning a language, even our native one?), I decided my language wanderlust was getting the better of me and figured, “Why not learn Russian? It's in the news all the time, and the best way to understand people is to talk to them. Not to mention, you love Russian history, so it's a no-brainer!”

That was naive me.

I found learning the Russian alphabet to be more challenging than the Japanese kana, albeit the kanji still takes the cake for the most time-consuming writing system to learn. Unlike many languages, Russian isn't a phonetic language, which simply means that, like English, some letters can change their sound depending on which word they're in.

Since not everyone has a Russian language pack installed on their computer, I'll refrain from typing anything out, but they have an “e” in their language that can be pronounced like the “eh” in English, or like “yeh”, which throws me for a loop every time.

I started my Russian with Michel Thomas' Russian course (I'll talk about him in another article), simply because I need to ease myself into the language, much like going swimming in a lake and having to slowly acclimate to the cool temperature. Michel Thomas is a nice course that I can only describe as being similar to how I would imagine Bob Ross would teach a foreign language. You'll get really good at grammar, but you'll definitely lack in vocabulary by the time you're done with it.

As such, as I move on to my actual thoughts on Assimil's course, bear in mind that I'm not 100% new to Russian at this point. I have a fairly decent grasp of grammar, know a lot of cognates, or shared words between two languages, and Michel Thomas doesn't teach any writing, so that's been new to me.

What is Assimil?

I should probably start by explaining what Assimil is. In my opinion, it's a very good language learning course. A French company, there are only a handful of their books and CDs translated into English. Luckily for me, Russian is one of them! I haven't taken on French yet, and I doubt I'll ever want to go beyond being able to read the language.

With all the language courses on the market, what makes Assimil stand out is that it teaches primarily through dialogue. Most books, especially those used by universities, have a short dialogue followed by a heavy grammar lesson and a long list of vocabulary to memorize. Assimil doesn't do that! It's a lot more like Duolingo in the way it teaches, but the method is quite versatile.

Typically, you'll get a dialogue exchange between two people that starts out very simple, and the accompanying audio is very slow at the beginning.

As you go through the dialogue, you are assimilating vocabulary and grammar naturally. Assimil provides only enough grammar notes to understand the sentences at hand, much as Duolingo does. What makes it so different from a program like Duolingo is that by using dialogues instead of just sentences, you can create scenarios in which certain words or phrases only make sense in context.

Another big difference is that Duolingo expects you to be able to understand a sentence after only seeing it a few times. Assimil constantly reminds you that you shouldn't be trying to memorize everything in a dialogue, as it will be presented to you numerous times in and in many different contexts. Memorizing comes second when using Assimil.

The downside is that it can be a little hard to figure out what, exactly, the program wants you to do. Luckily, there are plenty of good guides on the Internet, and if you hang around language learning forums and polyglot communities, you can find very unique ways to make Assimil suit your unique way of learning new information.

So, How Good is Russian with Ease?

Finally, onto the Russian course in particular. I'm using the 2011 edition, and I know that newer editions are a little bit watered down, but the vocabulary is more modern. A bit of a trade-off, perhaps, but nothing too major. After all, no single language program is going to be the end-all-be-all if your end goal is fluency.

What I Like

So far, the biggest boon to this course is the pronunciation guide. I found the pronunciation guide a little misleading in their Japanese course, which was a pity, as Japanese is one of the easiest to pronounce languages I've ever come across!

Russian, being so strange to me, really needs an accurate guide to pronouncing it, and Assimil is fantastic in this regard. Under each line of Russian text is an English transliteration of it, and the audio CDs are also a big help.

So far, I've found the grammar fairly comprehensible. I know the point of Assimil isn't to understand the grammar right from the get-go, but I like being able to follow it at least somewhat. I don't know how much of this is because Assimil is just that good at explaining the grammatically intimidating Russian language, or if it's because I've already been through Michel Thomas's course.

I think I'm going to put each dialogue, line-by-line, into Anki (a spaced repetition system for memorization) to help my brain absorb everything I'm learning.

What I Don't Like

I'm currently only on Lesson Eight, as you can probably tell from the picture, so I'm still at that frustrating stage where I feel like things are flying over my head. I wish that Assimil would have done the English translation the same way that they did for their Japanese course.

In the Japanese course, they would put the translation just like they do in the Russian course, but under each word, they would put what the literal translation of the Japanese word was.

Otherwise, I've found it to be extremely satisfying, and if that's my only complaint, a course is doing pretty good!

Conclusion

Overall, I'm going to continue using the course. Naturally, I'll be doing other things as well, such as watching Russian movies and shows, trying to read whatever I can, listening to their music, etc. That's just part of language learning.

All in all, I'm happy with the course so far. I don't know how long it'll take me to work through it, as it all depends on how often I need to go back and how well my supplemental material is at taking me where I want to be in the language.