Russian phrasebook

Sourced from Wikivoyage. Text is available under the CC-by-SA 3.0 license.
Ypsilon from Finland
Felipe Menegaz, Peter Fitzgerald

Russian (русский) is a Slavic language spoken by 300+ million people world-wide. Most people living in Russia use it as a first language, and many other people in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe know it as a second language. It holds official status in the Russian Federation, Abkhazia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, South Ossetia, and Transnistria.
In countries lacking official designation for Russian, such as Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic States (where schooling in Russian was mandatory under the Soviet regime), a solid majority of residents may speak it as a second language, in addition to having significant native-speaker minorities. However, due to tensions with Russia, many residents in these may be reluctant to communicate in Russian, and younger people will often prefer to speak English than Russian when communicating with foreigners.
Russian remains the lingua franca of choice throughout the rest of the former Soviet Central Asia states, Armenia and Azerbaijan, where it is effectively the language of commerce, government, and travel (despite lacking official status).
It is, to a lesser extent, an important language in Mongolia, where it is a compulsory second language in schools, and is the most widely spoken foreign language, and where signs remain in Cyrillic. Surprisingly enough, Russian has also become the third most widely spoken language in Israel, owing to a massive exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Russian was a compulsory second language in schools in the formerly communist central and eastern European countries, and may be spoken by older people who were schooled during the communist era. However, it has largely been supplanted by English since the fall of the iron curtain, and younger people are in general far more likely to speak English than Russian.
Russian remains perhaps the most important Eurasian travel language because English is very rarely spoken throughout the Russophone countries.


Pronunciation guide

Grammar