Introduction

About this resource

Let’sListen is a free interactive online resource designed to provide Russian language learners with an opportunity to listen to authentic audio recorded by a group of young Russians. The resource provides a series of interactive tasks for each audio file: vocabulary lists, questions, fill-in-the-blanks, and translation.

I created this resource for learners of Russian to get a glimpse at how real language sounds. The main goal of this project is to help you improve your ability to understand spoken Russian and talk like a native.

The Let’sListen project is based on the proceedings of the Let’sTalk project, a virtual exchange project between the U.S. learners of Russian and Russian learners of English. The audio and video files from Let’sTalk project were transformed into audio files for this OER resource. The quality of the files differs as it was not intended to be a professionally recorded project.

Target audience

The target audience for the Let’sListen interactive book are learners with at least intermediate level of Russian. The difficulty level of the audio files varies by the topic and speaker. Some will present a real challenge while some will pleasantly surprise you with how easy it will be for you to understand your Russian peers.

I also hope that many educators will find this project interesting and useful.

Speakers in the audio files

In the audio files, you will hear voices of a great group of students from Russia who took part in my Let’sTalk project in 2020-2022. All audio files are used with permission of the speakers.

Funding for this project 

The publication of this book has been supported by the Open Educational Resources (OER) funding by the University of Iowa Library.

Contact & Feedback 

Feel free to contact me with questions about this book via: RandomRussianLessons@gmail.com