By Elisabeth Cook Last updated: June 13, 2022

Tried and Tested! The Best Russian Quizzes Online

As either an evaluation of skills or a learning method, quizzes have a dubious reputation.

You might think of them as a more reliable way of making sense of your relationship or finding out which movie superhero you’d be.

But quizzes can be fantastic for your Russian studies… if you use the right ones, that is.

Today, we’re going to look at some of the absolute best online Russian quizzes, as well as some of the hottest quiz resources for learning Russian.

Handy Vocab and Grammar Quizzes for Russian Learners
Level Up! Proficiency Quizzes That Get Down to Business
Fun Quizzes to Test Your Russian Cultural Knowledge

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Handy Vocab and Grammar Quizzes for Russian Learners

The following resources give you access to quiz material that can be used continuously over a period of time. While quizzes are great for testing your level (and we’ll look at this further on in this post), many of the best current Russian learning resources use a quiz format as their main method of teaching the language.

Below are five of the best quiz tools for building your knowledge of Russian vocab and grammar.

Digital Dialects

Digital Dialects has been providing reliable free quizzes to language learners for quite some time, but they’ve freshened up their look semi-recently, so if it’s been a while since you’ve checked out their Russian resources, you may want to give them another go.

The DD website organizes “games” for you based on themed vocabulary lists that span basic subjects—such as colors, food and animals—and customizes these games according to the combination of audio, transliteration and Cyrillic that works best for you. While there are a few lists labeled as “advanced,” Digital Dialects’ Russian quizzes are generally suited to beginners and will even teach you the alphabet and numbers if you’re just starting out.

FluentU

FluentU is a language learning program that teaches using authentic Russian web videos with interactive captions. The program features review quizzes, which are personalized according to how much of a video’s language you’ve mastered.

The videos can be sorted by learner level, video format and subject matter. There are also multimedia flashcards for another way to practice new words from the videos.

Clozemaster

Clozemaster allows you to click through sentences in a flashcard fill-in-the-blank format, selecting or inputting the correct vocabulary. While this app doesn’t teach you grammar directly, it does give you access to real-life sentences, providing much-needed context for learning cases, verb conjugations and other shifts and changes.

Clozemaster covers a wide range of material and can be useful for all learning levels. It organizes sentences based on the number of common words used within them (for example, the 1,000 most common words, the 2,000 most common and so on) and allows you to quiz yourself based on how much Russian vocabulary you already know.

Loecsen

Loecsen teaches you basic Russian words and expressions through quizzes, which in itself might seem useful but not anything to get particularly excited about. However, in addition to a fairly slick interface that makes learning enjoyable and fun, it offers voice recognition, meaning that these quizzes will teach you not only to remember vocabulary but how to pronounce it.

VR technology has been getting better and better in recent years, and this resource gives you one easy way to take advantage of it using your computer’s microphone. Even if it doesn’t work perfectly for you, it’s a great tool for speaking practice, especially for beginners learning Russian at home alone.

Everyday Russian

Everyday Russian offers quizzes that are divided up by grammar topic, which allows you to target different subjects you’re struggling with. Feeling prickly about prepositions? Just can’t with cases? Take a multiple-choice quiz to test your knowledge and see what you need to work on.

While this resource is less extensive than the ones above and could be used simply for a skills evaluation, it can also be handy for some extra practice or a quick refresher. These quizzes will probably be most useful to intermediate-level students who are still refining their knowledge of Russian grammar.

Level Up! Proficiency Quizzes That Get Down to Business

As we’ve seen above, quizzes have expanded in usefulness beyond the application of testing your knowledge and have become a learning format in their own right. Still, sometimes you do just want to test your skills and see where you’re at. Taking online quizzes to determine your level of Russian can be fun and enlightening, especially if you use the right ones. Let’s check out the best Russian tests and quizzes for that purpose.

Before we get started, though, a quick note on the helpfulness of level tests: It might seem that the tests that are the most extensive are always the best, but that’s not necessarily the case.

Consider this: Dr. Kató Lomb, a famous polyglot, devised a simple level test for any language that appears in her book “Polyglot: How I Learn Languages.” This test (which you can find on page 170 and try out for your Russian) is based on knowledge of certain vocabulary words that are divided into four levels. To take the test, all you have to do is to look at four words in each category and determine whether you know them in the language you’re learning.

This test only uses 16 words total but considers what vocabulary a learner of each level is likely to know (for example, if you know the equivalent of “obstinately,” chances are you’re an advanced learner).

What this means for the practical purpose of testing your level online is that your general language level isn’t necessarily that difficult to determine, but there are all kinds of other beneficial information a quiz can give you. For example, if you’re able to see the answers you got wrong, you can apply that to your learning regardless of your level.

How helpful the particular quizzes below are for you will vary based on what kind of information is beneficial to your personal learning, your current perceived level and other factors.

Test Your Language

This is a free, very straightforward 60-question quiz that you can take immediately on any device. No signing up for an account is necessary, though you do have to subscribe to a mailing list at the end to get your results. This quiz will prove most useful for beginners, as its multiple-choice questions cover fairly basic words and phrases. Your final results show you your number of correct answers out of 60.

The main drawback of this test is that it rewards logical deduction to an extent. If you can’t read Cyrillic at all, you’ll definitely bomb it unless you get very lucky picking random answers. However, assuming you can decipher the alphabet, many of the questions might be easy to guess at using the process of elimination and identifying cognates with English. Still, the test is fun and useful for earlier Russian learners, as it brings up a lot of common vocabulary and does so through a fun, appealing interface.

LingQ

LingQ’s Russian proficiency test uses a few level-specific multiple-choice questions to determine your general level of knowledge. You can take it without giving your name or email address and get your results right on the site. The system estimates your language level as well as the size of your vocabulary within a few minutes.

This quiz, which is somewhat reminiscent of Lomb’s test mentioned above, is really quite ingenious because it only tests you on a limited amount of vocabulary but is organized in such a way that it lets you see very quickly where your knowledge falls short (or doesn’t), especially because you can see whether or not you got an answer correct immediately.

While it is, of course, possible to get an answer right by guessing, you’ll still be able to get an idea of where you stand by how difficult the questions are for you as you progress through the levels.

Study in Russia

Study in Russia’s quiz gives you 15 minutes to complete 25 questions. The entire test is in Russian, so this isn’t necessarily the best test for beginners.

As you answer each question, you’re able to see not only whether or not you answered correctly but which answers were right and which ones were wrong. This means that you can use this quiz, which is all multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank, to test your level and general understanding of Russian while also noting down any confusing vocabulary and sentences for further study. (Really, it seems like all quizzes should give you the opportunity to do this, but so many don’t!)

At the end of the test, you’ll be able to see your total number of questions answered correctly. You’ll also get a brief assessment and explanation—in Russian!—of where the quiz thinks you are level-wise. The whole test can be taken right on the website; no email or other information is required.

Language Trainers

Language Trainers provides quality level assessment tests for multiple languages, and Russian is no exception. This quiz gives you 70 questions to answer, which are fill-in-the-blank and entirely in Russian. However, it does a couple of key things differently from any of the quizzes we’ve looked at so far (as well as many other online Russian quizzes). One of these is that it lets you choose “I don’t know” for an answer. Obviously, multiple-choice questions can be an inaccurate test of your level if you guess correctly, and this test takes that into account.

Another handy feature is the ability to stop the quiz and get your results at multiple points. So, for example, if you put time into answering 40 questions but realize you don’t want to continue and do the full 70, you can ask for your level results at that point based on the questions you’ve answered so far. Doing the full quiz will give you a more accurate assessment, of course, but it’s nice that Language Trainers gives you some flexibility here. You do need to fill out a short form with your email address to get your level assessment and results whenever you want them.

Language Link

This is another all-Russian, fill-in-the-blank/multiple-choice quiz with an appealingly blocky interface. This one gives you 50 questions to answer, and you have to put in your email address at the end to receive your results. Note that the email they send you is in Russian, so if you don’t normally receive messages in Russian it might hit your spam folder.

The questions in this quiz are fairly simple but go beyond the basics, covering cases and other aspects of grammar, and the results only give you the number of questions you got right rather than a full assessment. Considering all that, it will probably be most helpful to intermediate learners who already have some idea of where they stand but want to see what aspects of the language they still need to work on.

Fun Quizzes to Test Your Russian Cultural Knowledge

Vocab and grammar are all well and good, but what’s the real reason you’re studying Russian? Whether it’s to read Tolstoy in the original, to study classical ballet, to understand Soviet history from a closer perspective or something else entirely, Russian culture is just as important to your acquisition of Russian as the language itself.

And while studying the two simultaneously (i.e., using the Russian language to learn about Russian culture) can make for efficient and ideal learning, you don’t necessarily have to wait until you’re able to read or listen in the language to start acquiring Russian cultural knowledge. In fact, a strong interest in culture can prove to be a great motivator for ramping up your language studies.

With that being said, why not take a break from your language concerns and use some online quizzes to test yourself on what you know about Russian culture? It might inspire you to fill the gaps in your education, give you confidence in the knowledge you already have or simply offer a low-commitment way to brush up on your education. Here are a few online quizzes that can help.

Russia Culture Quiz from The London School Group

This quiz on Russian culture, which comes with colored photographs, is an enjoyable spin through Russia and some of its most interesting and unique attributes. But, it’s also intended to be practical, asking questions that are relevant to travelers, businesspeople and those anticipating exchanges with Russian language partners.

With each question you answer, you’re immediately presented with the right and wrong answers, along with a snippet that explains the relevant aspect of culture to you. At just 20 questions, this quiz manages to pack in a surprising amount of knowledge relevant to any learner of Russian. You’ll be able to test your understanding of food, etiquette, history, superstitions and even some language tidbits (though vocabulary is transliterated rather than being written out in Cyrillic).

Exploring Russian History Quiz from Britannica

This Russian history quiz from the illustrious Encylopedia Britannica comes with an added thrill: it’s timed! While there are only seven questions (with 30 seconds allotted to give your multiple-choice answer to each), they get to the heart of well-known events and figures through key facts.

This might be a good quick quiz for those who fear their Russian history isn’t quite up to snuff and want to determine how hard they need to hit the books.

Russian Culture from Study in Russia

Here’s another quality multiple-choice quiz from Study in Russia that focuses on prominent people in Russian history. You’ll be asked to identify writers, dancers, filmmakers, artists and other cultural figures by a photograph and short bio.

The quiz, which has a total of 54 questions, covers quite a wide range of people and fields, so don’t feel bad if you get a lot of questions wrong. More than a tool to test your culture chops, this is really just a neat way to explore the work and accomplishments of some interesting and influential people.

Well, how do you feel about quizzes now?

Sure, they can be frustrating and anxiety-inducing when they’re being handed to you by a teacher, but for language learners of all types, they can quickly become a fun and fulfilling way of life.

So don’t stop at level tests. Harness the full power of quiz resources and make them a permanent part of your study routine!

Elisabeth Cook is a freelance writer who enjoys quizzes ranging from “educational” to “designed purely to waste time.” You can follow her on Twitter (@CooksChicken).