About

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My name is Mark Allen and I started learning Russian in February 2018. I began at first by using Duolingo, but I realized pretty quickly that if I was really serious about learning to speak Russian then I needed to put in some serious time with some flash cards to help pick up the grammar.

I watched a video which was very influential in my approach to developing my flash cards. In the video, the speaker talks about remembering case endings by having memorized example sentences to cover the most common endings. I thought this was an excellent approach to remembering how to use case endings as correctly as possible, hoping that in time and with a lot of practice, recall of the endings would be reasonably quick.

I am also a professional software developer, so I quickly wrote a prototype which could emit some of these “example sentences” but I decided that I wanted to create a library which I could embed in several different tools. One of the tools I wanted to make was something that could build flash card decks easily and quickly.

Over time using this tool, I created a collection of flash card decks which can really help you systematically memorize the case endings for Russian.

I have now created this website to help distribute the flash card decks to a broader audience. I hope you find them helpful!

Flashcard Decks

Please make sure you already have the free Anki flashcard software installed on your device(s). See Usage if you have further questions.

Cases

These flashcards drill endings for cases.

Note: These phrases in the flash cards were randomly generated - that means often they do not make sense (example: моя синяя ошибка - my blue mistake) but the point of these decks is not to memorize the phrases directly, but to practice the endings.

Singular nouns

I recommend you begin with genitive case first. Why? This is because animate male and neuter nouns “borrow” the endings for genitive case when they are used in accusitive case. So starting with genitive case first allows you to get a good running jump into accusitive case which ought to be the second case you practice.

Plural nouns

You’ll notice there’s no coverage of “accusitive” case plurals but that’s because the accusitive case with plural nouns borrows either nominative or genitive plural forms depending on if the noun is animate.

Except for genitive, plural endings are quite regular across all nouns and adjectives regardless of the noun’s gender.

Prepositions

This deck will help you practice and remember cases associated with specific prepositions. The examples demonstrate the way in which prepositions are used to express different concepts. In some cases, the case used by a preposition changes with its meaning.

These decks were generated using this software.

This is the main preposition deck. It contains 98 cards covering around 60 prepositions. On the front of the card is an example sentence using the preposition. The preposition is highlighted.

The back of the card contains the preposition, the meaning of the preposition, the case it uses and a translation of the example sentence.

There is also an “advanced” deck which contains 23 less frequent prepositions.

These two decks would not be possible to build without help from Max, Anna @russian_for_americans, Katya @russian_foryou, Ilona, and Marina. Thank you so much!

Personal pronouns

I recently discovered that I was pretty shaky on personal pronouns in dative, instrumental and prepositional cases, so I made a deck to practice them all. The source code to generate the import file is here.

Usage

How to Use These Flash Card Decks

All of the flash cards here are designed for use with the free, open-source Anki spaced repetition flash card system. There are version of Anki available for Windows, macOS, Linux, iPhone and Android systems. The Anki website is your first step.

Step 1

Download and install Anki on the devices where you want to practice Russian.

Step 2

Download one or more of the flashcard decks from this website and make them available to the Anki installation on your device(s).

Step 3

Begin practicing!