Russian B1/B2

About

This is a deck of card for learners of the Russian language. The level of difficulty is generally between B1 and B2/B2+.

The key features of this deck are:

• The cards are organised in a big deck called "Russian - Level B1/B2"; the largest sub-deck is on vocabulary (Словарный запас)
• The cards are organised using several tags. Each card contains a word_type to indicate whether the word to learn is a noun, verb, adjective, expression/idiom, etc.
• Where appropriate, the cards contain illustrations
• There is a blend of basic cards (Russian-to-English and/or vice versa) with a single word or short expression, and cards with sentences; research has shown that it's good to learn words in context, but to be able to identify them out of context too
• Most sentences have been harvested in the wild: from newspaper articles, books, YouTube videos, etc. Naturally, the nouns appear in different cases, and the verbs in different forms
• For words and phrases that either have multiple possible meanings, and/or words I found difficult to memorise, there are multiple cards so we see the word in different contexts
• I have included some questions from textbooks and standardised tests (e.g., тесты-тесты-тесты), but I only focused on those questions that I found challenging
• All words (with few exceptions) are stressed so you don't have to be!
• NEW: Following a recommendation by a user, as of today (22 March 2025, v0.6.1) I started to add audio to the cards of this deck using HyperTTS. All card with audio will be tagged with card_type::audio. So far, about 1200 recordings have been added.
• NEW: Sub-deck Аудирование и Shadowing with short audio samples from YouTube videos!

Sub-decks

The following subdecks are part of this deck

• Generative: Here a sentence in English is shown and you need to translate it to Russian; these are the most challenging cards
• География и страноведение: Russian cities, counties (области), and general facts about Russia
• Грамматика: well... grammar
• Давайте споём: lyrics of some nice songs
• Произношение: pronunciation (tricky cases only)
• Словарный запас: vocabulary: words and sentences with different types of cards incl. basic, basic and reversed, cloze, write-the-answer, and more

All cards have tags, including the topic tag. The cards try to be representative of the vocabulary commonly used in various contexts. The cards are organised in 32 big topics (with subtopics). Examples of topics are:

• topic::crime and topic::law_justice where you find words like "мародёрство" (looting), "разбой" (armed robbery), "грабитель" (robber), "заряженный револьвер" (loaded revolver) and more
• topic::politics with words like "баллотироваться" (to run for office), "законодательная власть" (legislative authority/power), and more; these are almost exclusively harvested from newspaper articles
• Some other topics that offer useful vocabulary for writing essays and understanding newspaper articles are topic::economy, topic::religion and topic::history
• There are topics with everyday items like topic::household::bathroom, topic::household::kitchen, topic::food_cooking::meat, and more

How to use "Аудирование и Shadowing" (Levels B2+ to C1)

This is a brand new sub-deck for listening and shadowing with audio samples from YouTube videos. On each card there is a link to the original YouTube video. On the front side of each card there is an audio file and no text. This is what you need to do:

• Listen to the audio and try to understand what it says
• Play it again and repeat it
• Flip the card, play the audio again and shadow it; you may have to repeat this a few times

This means that you will listen to each audio files a minimum of three times: (i) just listen, (ii) listen and repeat, (iii) flip and card and shadow.

This sub-deck currently counts 145 cards, but I aspire to create a lot more. All samples are from real people, actual native speakers (no AI-generated content).

Books

Some of the decks in this deck are from the following books:

1. С. Давлатов, Заповедник (57 cards)
2. С. Давлатов, Ремесло (71 cards)
3. М. Булгаков, Мастер и Маргарита (72 cards)
4. Б. Акунин, Смерть Ахиллеса, adapted (77 cards)
5. Н. Кун, Легедны и мифы древней Греции (145 cards)
6. А. Некрасов, Приключения капитана врунгеля (67 cards)
7. М. Каку, Физика невозможного (29 cards)
8. В. Пелевин, Generation П (67 cards, current work in progress)
9. Б.-Ч. Хан, Кризис повествования (32 cards, current work in progress)
10. Д. Глуховский, Метро 2033 (coming up next)

Version

This is version 28 of this deck (27 December 2025) with over 7.6k cards (more than 9.7k notes). I will be updating this deck regularly. Please feel free to leave a comment below, esp. if you would like to recommend changes or additions.