When it comes to home-schooling your child, the choices for source material are vast and daunting. This is especially true for those parents trying to find a suitable language course. Should you buy a textbook? Maybe. A packaged course from one of the big companies? Perhaps. It depends on the language your child is wanting to explore. But in this article, I’ll be discussing how to help your child learn Russian.
Probably the best place to start is with the free podcast called Russian Made Easy (which is available in video format, as well.) Consisting of thirty audio lessons, RME starts from absolute zero. That is, it assumes the student has no prior knowledge at all in the language. Still, even in the very first lesson, the students learn to say useful Russian phrases. All lessons carefully build on what was taught before, so be sure your home-schooler doesn’t skip around. And yet, when they finish all thirty lessons, they will have a solid foundation in the language. (To get technical, all six verb conjugations are covered, as well as all six grammatical cases.) Russian Made Easy is a free course available as a podcast on this site, and in app format.
Russian Made Easy for Android or Russian Made Easy for Apple devices
Why is Russian Made Easy free? Because it functions as an introduction to a much larger online course called Russian Accelerator. Russian Accelerator is popular with home-schoolers because your paid membership includes access to a native speaking Success Coach. This allows students to send in recordings of their speech for valuable feedback. (It also lets them know that they are speaking clearly and are understood by Russian speakers.) Russian Accelerator is also highly structured, which is useful for home-schoolers.
The recommended pace of Russian Accelerator is one lesson every other day. Given that there are ninety lessons in all, that comes to six months of in-depth lessons. After which, the student will have a solid intermediate grasp of conversational Russian. After that, for those wanting to continue with Russian, there are more advanced courses. RA II Advanced Verbs & Idioms, or their new Fast Track to Russian Fluency course. Many students also seek out private tutors to practice what they’ve learned during live Skype lessons.
Russian is one of the most important languages in the world, and one that will look very good on a home-schoolers college or job application: Speaks Fluent Russian. So be sure to introduce them to the Russian Made Easy course, or jump straight into Russian Accelerator. And let the learning begin!
