Spoken by almost 300 million people worldwide, Russian is the most widely spoken of the ‘Slavic’ languages - and is the fourth most popular language on the planet. Although it used to be the official language of the Soviet Union, Russian is still taught a lot in ex-Soviet republics like Belarus and Ukraine.

The alphabet consists of 33 letters (including ten vowels) and it’s written using Cyrillic letters, two of which have no sound but ‘harden’ or ‘soften’ the letter that comes before it. Like German, there are three genders in Russian: masculine, feminine and neuter.

And some good news for English learners, many Russian words have been borrowed from English: like “tank”, “footbol” and “internet”.