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Learning Russian is hard, confusing and for many of us native English speakers, brain breaking. The structure and syntax is different, strange things happen to word endings and there seems to be an inhumane amount of rules to learn. That said, I am still learning it and practising it and ru-pad.net comes from trying to make something that helps me, and hopefully you, with learning it.
I came to here by working for a Belarusian based company for many years and so traveled extensively around Belarus, Russia and Ukraine along with a stint working in Russia. So it seemed useful to learn some basics. Some years later I speak average Russian and married to a very understanding Belarusian wife. I also have many Ukrainian and Russian friends and want to speak with them in one of their native tongues. I am not what I would describe as naturally good at languages. My history with French at school was dismal and I struggle daily to improve. But every day I do improve a little and building and using ru-pad has helped me with that.
A large amount of my time while studying is looking up definitions, creating translations and trying to make sure my spelling, declensions and conjugations are correct let alone trying to make sure the sentence makes sense. With ru-pad I keep all that information together in one place that I can access anytime. By organizing my information while I study and not as a big chore during study I can use my time more effectively. I also found I was spending a lot of time creating flashcards to drill vocabulary or grammar. With ru-pad all of this is automated saving me up to an hour at least a week managing this manually. All of this leads to more time actually learning and reviewing, which is why ru-pad helps.
I spend much less time searching for dictionary information such as translations, declensions and conjugations. All the information I assemble I can easily put into phrasebooks that let’s me find the information easily again as well as export to Anki so I can learn the content thoroughly without spending time building flashcards. I tend to be in random places when I need something so the fact that it automatically syncs to all my devices makes it quick and simple to use wherever I am. Along with this I keep a complete history of my learning so I can go back and find old homework translations and an ever growing collection of phrasebooks.
I hope you find ru-pad as helpful as I do and by adding it to your learning toolbox you speed up a little the long slow path to speaking good russian.
Happy learning!
- Martin