Practice speaking Russian

How you practice Russian on Tokmia

Tokmia runs lives — group voice conversations you can drop into. Every live has a stage and an audience, and you arrive in the audience. You can stay there and just listen for as long as you want; when you are ready, you raise your hand and the host brings you up. A live holds up to eight speakers, so the people who come up actually get a turn.

If a group feels like too much, Practice Now pairs you one-to-one with somebody learning your language while you learn theirs, on a fixed timer with a shared prompt on screen — eight minutes of free conversation, or seven minutes of vocabulary or role play. Neither of you has to invent the first sentence.

Russian is one of the twelve languages on Tokmia with the learning side fully built out, so words you look up during a conversation and grammar mistakes pulled from the session afterwards go into spaced-repetition decks you can review the next day.

What is actually hard about speaking Russian

Not the same as what is hard about reading it. These are the things that show up specifically when you have to produce the language in real time:

Six cases, chosen mid-sentence

Every noun, adjective and pronoun changes by role. You can know the tables completely and still stall, because in speech the case has to be selected as the sentence is being produced, not afterwards.

Verb aspect is a choice on every verb

Perfective or imperfective, decided each time, and it is not the same distinction as tense in English. It is the single most persistent difficulty for learners and it responds to conversational correction better than to rules.

Palatalisation is a real distinction

Hard and soft consonants change meaning: брат and брать differ only in the final consonant's softness.

What a Russian live looks like

Hosts name their own lives and set the level, so you can tell before joining whether it is meant for you. Titles look like:

• Свободная беседа по-русски
• Русский для начинающих
• Подготовка к собеседованию

Examples of how hosts title lives, not a listing of what is running right now.

Before you start

• Listening counts. Sitting in the audience is a legitimate way to use Tokmia and a lot of people do it for their first week.
• Nobody can message you unless you follow each other back. There is no setting that opens your inbox to strangers — see Safety.
• Nothing is recorded. Voice conversations are never recorded, by us or for us.
• It is free. Joining and hosting lives and the review decks cost nothing, with no minute limit and no ads.

Free when it launches. Other languages