My personal experience

I was 22 when I first travelled to Russia on my own – the very first time was 7 years earlier, part of a school trip : I choose to study Russian for a couple of years because they were offering a school trip to Moscow. Let’s be honest, I was a terrible student and barely knew the alphabet when I got to Russia’s capital city.

22 was the first number I’ve learned (beside 1, 2, 3). A friendly babushka in the train taugh it to me. I learned the alphabet while trying to understand the menu in small cafés of provincial Russian towns. It took me a while to dare ordering the famous “herring under a fur coat salad” – Селёдка под шубой … (I found out later it’s also simply called Shuba!).

Now, I’ve spent over a year in total travelling different corners of the Russian Federation, another year across the South Caucasus and Central Asia, all former Soviet countries.

I’ve learned most of my (still poor) russian knowledge by talking with strangers ! From Adygea to the Pamir, Nagorno Karabakh to Buryatia, I can have broken conversations about plenty of topics, ask my way around, order food and even bargain prices at the market.

Russian is said to be spoken by 258 millions of people all across the former Soviet Union and in the world in general, either as a native or a second language. Some people are fluent like most Russian citizens, others only speak it a bit like women in Pamiri villages, but it doesn’t matter as long as you can communicate other than with smiles and hand gestures, right ?

Learning a few key phrases isn’t that complicated, people will ask you the same questions anyway.
They will notice and highly appreciate your efforts (or think you’re a spy!) and this will open you more doors than you could possibly imagine !

Story time : I once did a 3 days horseridding tour in Kirghizstan (awful, will never do again). One night my 2 newly made companions from Quebec and I ended up staying in a family yurt camp with a bunch of other tourists. No kidding, but everyone was from a French speaking country : Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec and me from France.

I left the dinner table while everyone was talking about their daily life back home and went to the yurt I was sleeping in. The mom of the Kirghiz family hosting us was making the beds.

I asked her in Russian if she could speak it – Her face lit up in a second !

– “You speak Russian ?!” she said
“Usually tourists from Europe don’t speak it, and I don’t know English so I never speak with them” she added.

She was genuinely happy! We chatted about random stuffs and her family while finishing to make the beds together.

So even if you speak only a little Russian, your grammar mistakes break ears and your accent is awful, it doesn’t matter, people would be glad if you say a few things in a language they feel comfortable speaking.