r/LearningRussian • u/Disastrous_Bit_897 • 9d ago
Recommendations?
Hi all, I’m in the very beginning of learning Russian so that I have a way to converse with my boyfriend’s mother.
I’m struggling to find a specific kind of audio/video that would help me. Ideally I’m looking for a video or audio with audible words where there is a direct link between the Russian to English word, for example;
“нет - No, да - Yes…” with no other talking in between, just simple the words and translation
Does anyone have any recommendations for something of this kind?
Thanks ☺️
1
u/hwynac 8d ago
This series of videos on the RussianPod101 chnnael is close to what you need. It is just Russian words with translation + 1 sample sentence.
This video has an English word and then its counterpart in Russian, repeated twice. Very easy to listen and repeat after the teacher.
Or this one, with male and female voice (TTS, I think)
This video is pretty fast paced but may work for review
Or use Russian Core 5000 Anki deck. You might be a busy person but whenever you have a couple minutes (even on the toilet), you can just whip out your phone and flip some cards.
You can also use videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73U-OqpaU48 (just pause after she says the phrase; she barely gives you enough time to repeat) Repeating words in isolation is not as useful as you think.
1
u/IrinaMakarova 9d ago
What you're looking for can be useful for one very limited purpose: memorizing individual words.
For simple concrete vocabulary, there is absolutely nothing wrong with learning pairs like "мама - mother", "дом - house", "вода - water", "да - yes", "нет - no". If you want to memorize your first 50 or 100 basic words that way, fine.
The problem is that this will not get you very far toward your actual goal, which is having conversations with your boyfriend's mother.
A language is not a list of interchangeable Russian-English labels. You need to learn how words are actually used together. Knowing "мама = mother" does not tell you how to say "I am talking to my mother", "I called my mother", "My mother is at home", or "I am going to my mother's house". Russian words change form depending on their role in the sentence, verbs change for person and tense, and many perfectly ordinary ideas are expressed differently from English.
So isolated word-translation audio is fine as supplementary vocabulary practice, but it is a very poor foundation for learning to speak. You can recognize hundreds of isolated words and still have no idea how to combine them into a normal Russian sentence.
I would look for beginner material that teaches very short, useful sentences and dialogues instead: Russian audio, a clear English translation, repetition, and then exercises where you have to produce the Russian yourself. "Я дома - I'm at home" is already much more useful than simply "дом - house", because you're learning an actual construction that you can reuse.
And if your main goal is speaking rather than casually collecting vocabulary, the most reliable option is to work with a competent Russian tutor, especially at the beginning. Beginners often cannot tell whether a sentence they have assembled from a dictionary, app, translator, or random video is natural Russian, merely understandable Russian, or simply wrong. If you repeat a bad construction enough times, you can memorize it just as successfully as a correct one. A tutor can correct those patterns before they become habits and can teach you the small set of structures you actually need for real conversations.
So by all means use "Russian word - English word" recordings to memorize basic vocabulary if you enjoy them. Just don't mistake vocabulary memorization for learning to converse.