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!
Publications
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Book
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Article
A corpus-driven approach to teaching academic Russian as a second language
In teaching a language for specific purposes (LSP), a lot of attention is traditionally paid to the lexicon, which often requires a corpus-based approach. The article describes the procedure of creating an academic word list for studying Russian as a second language (L2). It offers an effective way of collecting an academic phrase bank in a specific domain. The article demonstrates typical problems concerning Russian academic vocabulary and the ways of solving them. In this paper, we suggest a methodology for extracting academic vocabulary based on a corpus of up-to-date academic texts of different genres and authors. This study resulted in the creation of an academic word list of economic vocabulary containing about 900 content words. As another applied result, we also present a training platform for L2 academic Russian in the field of economics. The platform allows users not only to explore academic vocabulary in an authentic context, but also to practice it, with or without a teacher. It offers the words and multiword expressions that are the most characteristic in the collected corpus of economic texts. The article contributes both to the field of Russian corpus linguistics and to the teaching of Russian for specific purposes.
Russian linguistics. 2026. Vol. 50.
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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.