By Yuliya Geikhman Last updated: April 3, 2024

5 Online Russian Exercise Resources to Work Up a Sweat

Language skills are like muscles: If you don’t work them out, they become harder to use.

That’s why doing your Russian exercises is so important.

Save some trees by getting online and heading to these resources with Russian exercises right in your browser!

Resources for Online Russian Exercises
How to Use Online Exercises to Improve Your Russian
How to Type in Russian

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

Resources for Online Russian Exercises

1. Learn Russian

Learn Russian is like a robust interactive Russian textbook with 100 lessons that will take you from complete beginner to advanced Russian user. As you make your way through the lessons, the program tracks your progress and gives you a clear sense of what you’ve learned well and what can still use some drilling.

The exercises here are part of the core learning method: Each lesson begins with a brief introduction to the topic and new vocabulary words, then leads right into the drills.

Exercises are varied and test different aspects of your Russian learning, so you’ll get plenty of practice in on every new topic you learn. Learn Russian will have you dragging and dropping words into the right spots, matching words to pictures, writing in your own answers, using audio to answer and much more. It’s an engaging and effective way to retain information you’ve learned!

Once you’ve completed all the lessons in one unit, take the unit test to see how well you’ve learned the information!

2. FluentU

With FluentU, you can learn Russian by watching short video clips from authentic Russian media—movie trailers, music videos, educational videos, news segments and more.

Every video comes with learning tools and exercises to help boost your comprehension and build your vocabulary. Just choose from the expansive library of videos organized by difficulty level, topic and format.

As you watch, you can hover over any word or phrase in the subtitles to see the translation, part of speech and an associated image.

Click on the word or phrase for example sentences, audio pronunciation and other videos where it’s used.

When you finish watching a video, you’ll take a personalized vocabulary quiz to test your knowledge. You can add new words to a flashcard deck and then use vocabulary exercises to review and memorize them.

3. Russian for Free

We’ve recommended Russian for Free before, and with good reason: The website boasts a huge range of lessons, vocab and grammar information and Russian learning tips and games. Unsurprisingly, they also have a pretty great exercise section!

The exercises here are specifically focused on noun and adjective cases. Depending on your learning level, you can choose your difficulty level by only testing one gender at a time, or mixing things up for a challenge.

Exercises are presented with a drop-down menu of choices, and a text box below each question lets you know if you got it right or not. A counter on the top left keeps track of how many you got right on the first try. Got a low number? You’ll probably want to study the case again.

These exercises act as a good supplement for learning cases. Study a case, then head to Russian for Free to test your skills in actually forming it. Although the exercises are divided into “beginner,” “intermediate” and “advanced,” we recommend that you be at least at an intermediate level before you attempt them.

4. “Golosa” (George Washington University)

This collection of quizzes is presented through Quia, and covers a nice range of beginner-level conversational topics like the weather, asking for directions, hobbies and other essentials for those just starting out with the language.

These exercises are meant to accompany Book 2 of the “Голоса” (“Golosa” [Voices]) workbook. This means that it’s meant to be done in a classroom with a teacher to check your answers, and as a result, the exercises in this resource are typically free-form and can’t be checked.

Still, this is a great resource if you’re trying to actually use the language in conversation, as it will prompt you to start writing more and using the concepts you’ve learned to form correct sentences.

Just a caveat: The quizzes don’t allow you to copy and paste—this is done to prevent cheating, but it can exclude you if you rely on the virtual keyboards we linked to earlier in this post.

If you prefer being able to check your answers, head over to the exercises for Book 1 of the “Golosa” series, which is also available online for free.

These exercises are more traditional in nature and offer multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions that do offer the correct answer to check your own against.

The content here is even more beginner-friendly, covering common words and phrases, some grammar concepts and translation exercises.

5. “Learning to Communicate in Russian” (UCLA)

Learn Russian from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) thanks to this resource! Although the university has moved on to a shiny new locked website design, this resource is still available online for free for anyone to use.

This first-year beginner-friendly resource is like an entire online textbook. Listen to audio clips, use PDF study guides and flashcards and, of course, complete exercises on this awesome website.

Exercises cover every possible aspect of Russian learning: Listening comprehension, reading and writing cursive, writing out answers, fill-in-the-blank (with the Cyrillic letters right there in the quiz for you to click on—no special keyboard necessary!) and so much more.

With this resource, you get to experience a college-level course and a free online textbook in one! All that’s missing is the teacher.

How to Use Online Exercises to Improve Your Russian

Exercises are meant to be used in conjunction with other learning methods. They’re like the unit test you used to get in school to make sure you remember everything.

Use them to:

Supplement other learning methods. Exercises aren’t necessarily meant to be used on their own to learn Russian. They work best as a companion to Russian textbooks, listening practice sessions and any other ways you like to learn.

Test yourself on specific topics. To gauge your progress, do some exercises before you study a topic, then do them again right after. Use your improvement to home in on specific problem areas.

Recap after a study session. A great way to drill information into your mind is by making exercises a part of your study session. Spend about five minutes doing some exercises after you study to further reinforce the topic or concept you were learning.

Keep things fresh in your mind. Do you still remember everything you learned a month ago? Two months ago? Doing exercises on topics you’ve already covered can help keep them in the forefront of your mind so you don’t forget them.

How to Type in Russian

In order to complete a few of the exercises above, you’ll need to type in Russian.

The first thing you’ll want to do is download a Russian language pack. You can do this through the official Windows website or by following some simple instructions for Mac users.

Locating the correct keys may take some time, but you can make Russian typing a lot easier by buying a special keyboard (search for “English Russian keyboard” for more options), or just getting Russian letter stickers to add to your current keyboard.

On mobile devices, you should be able to add the Russian keyboard through your device’s keyboard preferences (usually in the “languages”) section.

Some browsers, programs and add-ons (like Gmail, for instance) allow you to change the input language. How you do this will vary based on what you’re using.

Not sure how to get it to work in the browser? Don’t worry, there’s another option: Use an online Russian typing program, like one of these:

TypeIt’s Russian virtual keyboard
The Automatic Cyrillic Converter
The Latin to Cyrillic Converter (this one works in the way that’s closest to having an actual Russian keyboard)

However you do it, we recommend that you don’t skip this step! If you’re learning Russian, being able to use it online and on your computer will be useful in the long run.

Whew. Breathe in, breathe out. Do some stretches. Have you worked up a sweat with all this exercising?

Remember to work out your Russian muscles regularly with the resources in this post!