russian

i’ve been brushing up on my russian since i found out about duolingo last week. i’m only ~20% through the program but it’s pretty fun – you can make ‘clubs’, which i did yesterday. i named it “Мы любим Путин и Трамп” and it immediately filled up with randos and hit the user cap within a day, lol. it’s got a leaderboard (pictured) which i spent an hour grinding today, but unfortunately you’re unable to communicate with your club in any meaningful way, just a half-dozen pre-made choices along the lines of ‘cant beat me!’ or something similarly devoid of content.

anyway, i was looking into what other options there were for practicing russian online or on smartphones. a very promising one is wordbrewery, which aims to teach you core vocabulary using auto-excerpted sentences from current news stories – though it seems to have an issue with scraping comments as well. i also found the learning russian subreddit, which has what looks like a nice assembly of resources if you’re interested in learning or refreshing, as well some cute stuff like the following: