Language through Literature
A Readlang alternative for Russian
What Readlang is better at
Readlang is a lovely piece of work — it turns any web page into a clickable reader, which means the whole internet is your library. For reading news, blogs, or anything you find yourself, it is the right tool.
What this is for instead
The trade here is curation for coverage: 24 texts, chosen and graded, with a lemma map so marking a word marks every inflection of it — the thing that makes Russian tractable and that a general web-page reader cannot do. The vocabulary you are shown is ordered by how many whole sentences it opens across the actual shelf.
The numbers, since they are checkable
Original texts by Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: 114,550 running words in 8,637 sentences, 10,386 distinct dictionary words, and 22,409 inflected forms with prepared meanings and stress marks. The reading assistance is subject to correction. Just under half of the vocabulary — 4,731 words — appears exactly once, which is why the word lists here are ordered by how many whole sentences a word unlocks rather than by frequency.
Seven free editorial reading pages
Seven complete Chekhov stories are open on their reference pages with no account and no email address. The interactive courses have a separate learning sample:
- Смерть чиновника — The Death of a Clerk, 677 words
- Толстый и тонкий — Fat and Thin, 511 words
- Хамелеон — Chameleon, 901 words
- Лошадиная фамилия — A Horsey Name, 904 words
- Злоумышленник — The Malefactor, 1063 words
- Студент — The Student, 1124 words
- Ванька — Vanka, 1153 words
Try the learning sample · the full interactive library is €5 a month or €39 a year, cancellable in one click, and your reading record stays yours whatever happens to the subscription.