The best AI apps to practice speaking Russian

What you need to practice speaking Russian

Russian takes work. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the 25th hardest for English speakers, at 6,067 effort points. That’s about twice what Spanish takes, and a lot more than German (4,255). It sits right next to Vietnamese (6,096) and Polish (6,329).

The alphabet looks like the hard part. It isn’t. What makes Russian hard is the endings and the stress, at full speed, in a real conversation.

• A new alphabet, but a quick oneCyrillic has 33 letters, and some look English but aren’t: Р is r, Н is n, В is v. So ресторан is restoran, a restaurant. Most people can sound out words after a week or two. Until then, you want the pronunciation above each word.
• Six casesNouns change their ending with their job in the sentence. Москва is Moscow, but you live в Москве, go в Москву, and come из Москвы. Knowing the tables is one thing. Getting the ending right while you talk takes practice.
• Stress that movesRussian doesn’t write the stress, and it changes the word. Замок is a castle if you stress the first syllable, and a lock if you stress the second. An unstressed о sounds like an a, so молоко, milk, sounds like “ma-la-KO”.
• Verbs come in pairsMost verbs have two forms. Я читал книгу: I was reading the book. Я прочитал книгу: I finished it. You pick one every time you talk about the past or the future.
• Lots of Russian you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: Russian videos and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeA language this hard takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Russian. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Russian YouTube videos and read stories at your level, with the pronunciation above every word. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itKnowing a word isn’t the same as using it, with the right ending and the stress in the right place. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level. The screenshot below is Jan’s own Russian: 941 words he’s used so far.

Brand new to Russian? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the alphabet and the basics with a course like Duolingo (free) or Pimsleur, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Russian

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies with the pronunciation above every word, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, how to say it, what kind of word it is, and an example with a translation. Its family and its forms are one tap away. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Russian teachers

Five teachers. Artem from Novosibirsk, the YouTuber behind Russian Progress. Elena from Kazan. Mikhail and Tatiana from St. Petersburg. Tatiana has a realistic face, so you see her speak as you chat.

And Xiaoma from New York, one of our co-founders. He learned many languages himself, so he knows where you’ll get stuck.

• 
  Artem Nazarov

  Novosibirsk · Russian

  Russian Progress
• 
  Elena Sokolova

  Kazan · Russian
• 
  Mikhail Orlov

  St. Petersburg · Russian
• 
  Tatiana Ivanova

  St. Petersburg · Russian
• 
  Xiaoma

  New York City · American

  Xiaomanyc

Input: Russian to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Russian you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now, both with the pronunciation above every word. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Russian YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with: the stress marked on the Cyrillic, the transliteration above it, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Suggested for youWatch suggests Russian videos by topic, with a row made for learners, from channels like In Simple Russian, Inhale Russian and Russian with Dasha. Each one shows the share of words you’d understand.
• Stories written for youRead writes Russian texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher: Moscow, the metro, Lake Baikal, Russian tea. There’s today’s news in Russian, too.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Russian word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Russian on Duolingo. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Langua · Teacher AI vs Praktika · Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending