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. Fifteen 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
Fifteen texts by Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: 68,172 running words in 5,075 sentences, 7,746 distinct dictionary words, and 15,261 inflected forms glossed by hand with their stress marked. Just under half of the vocabulary — 3,824 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.
No trial, no card — the seven are simply free
Seven complete Chekhov stories are open with no account and no email address, so you can judge all of this yourself in about five minutes rather than taking a comparison page's word for it:
- 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
Open the reader · the full library is €5 a month or €39 a year, cancellable in one click, and your reading record stays yours whatever happens to the subscription.