Basic Russian Class.
Lesson. 1. Introduction into the Russian Language.
By the number of speakers, the Russian language is the seventh most-spoken language in the world. 160 million people speak Russian as their native language and another 120 million people use it as their second language.
Russian is the official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, as well as a common language of the other republics of the former Soviet Union. Large numbers of Russian speakers live in Israel, Mongolia, China, the USA, Canada, Australia, South America, and many European countries.
Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, World Health Organization, UNESCO, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, International Olympic Committee, and many others.
There are three grammatical genders in the Russian language – masculine, feminine, and neuter. In most cases, nouns ending in “a” are feminine, nouns ending in a consonant are masculine, and words ending in “o” or “e” are neutral.
Unlike in English, there is no set word order in the sentence because grammatical relationships are shown by inflection. Definite or indefinite articles do not exist in the Russian language. The meaning conveyed by these articles is understood by context.
The Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which is quite different from the Latin alphabet that English or Spanish languages use.
This is what the Russian alphabet looks like:
If you couldn’t attend the first lesson, don’t worry! We recorded it for you!
In the next lesson we will learn how to pronounce letters of the Russian alphabet.
Please contact me at ebonjour@kckpl.org if you have any questions or want more resources.