Learn Russian to conversational in nine months
Nine months at 40 minutes a day plus weekly tutor calls gets a determined English speaker to halting but real Russian conversations. Roughly 240 hours total. Cyrillic takes a week. The six cases take the rest of the year — and the only way through them is enough input that they stop being a chart.
9 months · ~240 hours · hold a 10-minute conversation, read short news
1.Cyrillic — first, in a week
Thirty-three letters, mostly familiar shapes with reassigned sounds. Use Russian for Free's seven-lesson alphabet course — printed, cursive and hand-written variants with audio. By Friday you should be sounding out signs and menus. Skip transliteration completely from this point forward — every minute reading Russian in Latin letters delays your real reading. The alphabet is the cheap part of Russian; treat it that way.
Free
Russian for Free — alphabet →2.Russian for Everyone — self-study
A free, structured eleven-lesson grammar course written for English-speaking self-learners and quietly the best free Russian curriculum online. It walks you through the cases — nominative through prepositional — with examples, exercises and audio. Work one lesson every two to three weeks. This is the resource you reread when a case ending stops making sense; it's blunter than any textbook and free.
Free
Russian for Everyone →3.italki + Russian With Max
From month three, book a community tutor on italki for 30-minute conversation lessons twice a week. Russian community tutors run $8–15/hour. Tell yours you'll bring topics, that they should correct case endings ruthlessly, and that you want them to speak Russian to you the whole time. In between, watch Russian With Max on YouTube — slow, clear comprehensible-input videos by a certified teacher who narrates his life in deliberately graded Russian.
italki ~$8–15/hour; Russian With Max free
italki Russian tutors →If this doesn't fit you
If you have a trip planned and need survival Russian in weeks, replace steps 2 and 3 with Pimsleur Russian ($21/month). It drills travel-shaped phrases into your mouth and ignores cases. You'll arrive able to handle hotels, taxis and restaurants. You will not be conversational, you'll be lost the moment a native says anything unscripted, and you'll forget most of it within a year.
Why this path
Russian's case system is famous, and most learners burn out trying to memorize the tables before they've heard the language enough to feel which ending is right. The tables are reference, not study material. Russian for Everyone teaches the cases through real sentences in the order they're useful; Russian With Max gives you the input hours that turn rules into instinct; italki forces production before perfectionism kills your speaking. Skip the tutor and you'll plateau at "I can read but I can't talk." Don't.