HSE Moscow offers Russian language instruction throughout the year. If you’re interested in improving your Russian (or starting from scratch), we’re sure you’ll find a programme that matches your level and goals.
How It Works
Applications are processed on a rolling basis and can be submitted at any time
Within two weeks of receiving your application, we will send an acknowledgment of receipt
If you do not hear from us within two weeks of sending, please contact International Admissions
Russian Language Courses
Administration
Olga Eremina
School Head
oeremina@hse.ru
Anastasia Zinchenko
Deputy Head
azinchenko@hse.ru
Student Voices
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Jonathan Pionati (USA)
I studied at level 4. I really enjoyed the Russian language course at HSE, and especially the teacher Anna! She is the best Russian language teacher in the world! The course was exciting, fun and taught us a lot. The focus on grammar and the discussion format of the classes were especially useful. I would recommend this course to anyone!
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Ingrid Mulyono (Indonesia)
I studied Russian from the very beginning, starting with the alphabet. Taking Russian classes was really helpful for me living and communicating in Russia. I highly recommend these classes to students or expats who want to start learning or improve their Russian.
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Jiho Chang (South Korea)
The courses were very useful for me. Thanks to them, I was able to expand my knowledge significantly. I learned the correct expressions and developed my speaking skills. It was completely different from how I studied Russian in Korea. Here, I felt more interested and became more active. I recommend Russian language courses at the Higher School of Economics to those who want to study Russian in Moscow, because they have a very good teaching system and interesting course content.
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Szép Regő (Hungary)
I took part in the Russian language course at HSE. My teacher was Mariya, and I found her way of teaching to be really effective. I had little to no experience before, and with the course I learnt a lot about grammatical concepts, useful vocabulary about Russia, Moscow and its wonderful Metro system, about cultures, holidays and life in general. I really liked how thoroughly we dove deep into each topic, and due to this the course gave me great general understanding of the language. Mariya emphasized the importance of speaking practice, which helped with my pronunciation. I had some difficulty adapting to the language, but with each class it became easier and my confusion cleared up. I can only recommend Mariya and the course, and I’m really thankful for her work!
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Boris Senin Caruallanki Parian (Peru)
My experience was amazing because at the end of the course I was able to talk to the teachers, friends, other Russian people. I remember that we had very interactive classes where we all had the opportunity to talk. We also had various activities where we could visit historical places. We could also participate in various clubs, such as film club, theater club and others. I participated in the theater club. This experience was very useful for me because I had to speak only Russian and memorize various dialogues, which helped me speak Russian better. I would highly recommend you to take Russian lessons here, you will love it!
News
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Academic Internship (University of Belgrade)
November 20
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Expedition to Tajikistan
November 07
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A Lecturer of the School of Russian as a Foreign Language Participated in the Conference in Kazan
September 30
Publications
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Book
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Article
Direct object acquisition in the speech of adult L2 Russian learners
This article investigates direct object acquisition by adult learners of Russian as a second language (L2). Students of
different proficiency levels (A1-C1) took part in the experimental study and their data was compared with that produced by the L1 speakers. It found that verb valency, as well as learner profi ciency levels, significantly impact this process. Verbs with 5–6 object types demonstrate more differences between L1 and L2 groups than verbs with 3–4 object types, indicating a link between verb valency and acquisition difficulty. Object types used by low proficiency level speakers turned out not to be always the most common or frequent in standard Russian, as the most common types do not equal the simplest ones. The distribution of direct object types was only partly affected by the proficiency level. L2 learners of almost any level appeared to be familiar with different direct object types. It claims that non-accusative, peripheral object types, like infinitives, do not depend on the language proficiency level, regardless of their frequency.Вестник Новосибирского государственного университета. Серия: Лингвистика и межкультурная коммуникация. 2025. Vol. 23. No. 2. P. 130-144.
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Book chapter
Russian for special purposes: Corpus-based approaches to vocabulary selection
This chapter is a pedagogically oriented corpus-based study. It describes a method of selecting relevant vocabulary expressing causal relations in Academic Russian. Our study contributes to the corpus-based investigations of academic Russian texts and shows how computational techniques and language data analysis can be used to develop and simplify content-based and discipline-specific instruction for university courses of Russian for Special Purposes. The proposed list of causal expressions is designed as a part of the Russian Academic PhraseBank – a searchable database of multi-word expressions specific to academic texts and organized by discourse functions. The chapter discusses the structure of the PhraseBank, its pedagogical applications and limitations, with a focus on the learner-friendly and structured representation of the relevant expressions.
In bk.: Teaching Russian Through STEM: Contexts, Tools, and Approaches. Vol. 1st Edition. L.: Routledge, 2024. Ch. 7. P. 159-182.