Learning Russian? Find a Russian friend to talk to!

Russian, of course, is not the easiest language to learn. For example, when you just managed to memorize the Cyrillic alphabet, the number of rules and exceptions of the Russian grammar can easily shake your motivation.

So how does one keep the motivation going? The answer, as always, is to practice immediately and regularly. And having a Russian pen pal can help you with that.

Eventually, to be able to speak Russian (as well as any other language) fluently, you need to teach your brain to think in Russian. To be able to think in Russian, you need to have enough Russian words and phrases in your brain ready to pop up just when you need them. Composing a message to your pen pal trains your brain to do exactly that: by learning new words and phrases that you can immediately use, and memorizing commonly used patterns that your pen pal is using.

On top of that, language exchange with Russians is an excellent way to make Russian-speaking friends and learn about the Russian culture. It’s a way to bridge the gap between your Russian classes or textbook and real world communication with real Russians.

There are many sites that are dedicated to language exchange, and today we would like to introduce you to one of them, focused specifically on exchange of the Russian language.

Russian Pen Pal is a free site for those who are looking for a Russian speaking friend and for Russians studying foreign languages and looking for a language exchange partner.

The concept is quite simple:

First you need to register. The second step is to fill up you profile answering a few questions. After that you can start searching for new Russian friends.

When you find somebody you like, you can send them a message. The particularity of the site is that you can only send 1 message at a time. After you sent a message, you need to wait for the reply to be able to send another message to the same person. The same works in the opposite direction. This means that if you don’t like the person who wrote to you, you can just ignore (hide) the message and that person will never bother you again.

The service does not disclose the emails of the users. If you like your pen pal and would like to move your conversation to other platforms, you can easily do it by exchanging your contact details with your pen pal.

The site also has its own blog where you might find some useful tips for learning Russian.

So, if you feel like it is time to make some new friends from Russia, give it a try now!