At various conventions people have come up and told me they have studied Russian, or would like to, and ask about both opportunities to study and the best methods available. I can only speak from experience, and provide links to various sites which might prove useful.
I first started to study Russian in the eighth grade. The Four Continent Book Corporation of Chicago (an importer of Soviet propaganda and other Russian books) had advertised a number of Russian SF books in English in Amazing Stories, including Efremov's Andromeda and Obruchev's Plutonia, and along with the books came a large catalog of other titles. I became curious. American newspapers and sources claimed that Russian newspapers contained lies and propaganda. What if they were not telling the truth? The only way to be certain would be to read the Russian newspapers. Also, the books were very cheap (And if you want the conclusions I came to, they're at the end.)
I soon acquired a pair of books by one Nina Potapova called "Russian Course" parts I and II, and made it through the dative case before giving up. Studying a foreign language on one's own is hard. I had much better success with Spanish, which was taught at Peabody, MA's High School. The only problem with Spanish was there was so little SF published in it in the sixties. True, there was Don Quixote, Ruben Dario, the Golden and Silver Ages and the rest of modernismo, but no blasters, starships crashed on distant worlds, or aliens...
"Juventud, divino tesoro,
Ya te vas para no volver
Cuando quero llorar no lloro,
Y a veces lloro sin querer!"
Pretty much says it all.
After my first bout of college I got interested again and found the old Potapova books. I was working as a security guard at what was then the Provident Bank building in down-town Boston, at night, and had six hours alone each night to do whatever I wanted (other than to break into the vault and walk away with a million dollars) so long as I reported any fires. I carried my typewriter to work each night on the back of my bike and wrote a novel which has, fortunately, never sold. I also studied Russian, this time all the way through to the Instrumental case. I also began to read the newspapers haltingly. At the time Novoe Russkoe Slovo, the New York Russian language newspaper, still had its front page covered with Orthodox Christian death notices (lots of them. The Third Wave of Jewish immigration from the old USSR had just begun because of the Jackson-Vannick Amendment and conditions for studying the language improved.)
I did two years at Harvard Extension under Pat Chaput (very good teacher, Mrs Vodapyanoff and Nina Belodedova were the native speakers who tried to correct the really bad vocal habits I had picked up studying by myself) before deciding to matriculate at UMASS, Boston, which then had its own Russian Department. I tested into third year Russian and enrolled. The teachers were Anny Newman, John Dick, Diana Bergin, and Maya Berlina, who had just come from Leningrad.
Eventually, of course, I switched to Anthropology, went on to grad school in it, and worked a while in that field.
Some Observations:
First, if you have already passed puberty you approach a new language with a built in disadvantage. When you learned your original tongue from your parents your brain was expanding at a rapid rate, new connections were being made all the time, and MRI scans show that the linguistic information you access is very centrally located. Any foreign language will most likely be learned by a brain that is not expanding, which is not generating new neural connections quite so rapidly, and which will store your new linguistic memories in relatively remote areas.
Secondly, many people learn in different ways. I had to speak the word aloud, then write it down, then use it in conversation or in writing before I learned it. I generated page after page of slightly different sentences where the words were in different cases, and verbs in different persons and aspects.
Third, at the time I first studied I had little opportunity to actually hear Russian spoken properly, at speed. Even in college, Russian movies were few and far between. Students had to depend on the American-Soviet Friendship society, for whom the projection of Russian movies was a religious activity (one evening, when they were showing Jamilla,(this was the 1969 'Dzhamiliya,' not the 1994 version with Jason Connery as Daniyar) they first projected a propaganda piece on the kids' resort Artek, with an uber-Soviet script read by a Ukrainian in a perfect, flat, Canadian accent. By the time it got around to the little Cuban boy doing the obligatory denunciation of the US in verse, the audience was laughing uproariously and rolling about on the floor holding their sides in. The people putting the movie on could not understand why.)
Now, the situation is completely different. If you live in New York you can get Russian TV on cable. Russian movies can be bought in Russian stores on tape and DVD in Boston, and Lynn, MA. You can listen to Russian radio on your computer. Our MOVIES site will offer reviews of both SF and non-SF Russian language movies, as well as links to movie scripts that are on the internet. Just go to MOVIES in our MENU for a list of addresses.
Fourthly, Russian is an Indo-european language with a grammar like Latin's but which uses Slavic roots as the basis for most words. In Spanish or French, the more advanced you get, the more sophisticated the concept, the more likely the word is to be a calque of an English word. This happens some times in Russian, most often if the word has some technical meaning, but for students of Russian the study of Slavic roots and general word formation are major activities. It does not get easier as you go along. And good writers are not limited to the words in the dictionary (Leskov is a good example. You're educated but you've never heard of Leskov? Trust me, you're missing a lot of fun.) In general, the better dictionaries are up to speed for reading Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but even a modern short story by Bulychev (for example, "Another Field,") will have one or two terms that are clearly self-evident to Russians but whose meaning an American can (as his translator I) hope to understand only by context. There are also cultural differences. Russians, for example, do not do baseball. Explain: "I can't get to first base with this girl," to someone who thinks that soccer is called 'football.'
There are numerous websites dedicated to people who want to learn any number of foreign languages, ranging from the commercial to highly professionalized freeware.
Transparent Language is a private company which produces learning CDs in everything from Azerbaijani to Zulu, and at one time (they retrenched about November of 2000) they offered educational CDs in Russian as well as their basic language learning program, including most of "White Sun of the Desert [Beloe Solntse Pustiny]" (a superb film well worth watching.) Their CDs are very good for aural comprehension, providing both text, translation, and a native speaking voice all at once. . The approach to grammar is rather slapdash, which is common for on-line sites as well. I recommend a solid grammar text (anything, anything but something put out by the MLA the Modern Language Association's 'Audio-Lingual' method works well with two year olds in a home setting, but is a complete waste of time for anyone over seven. The MLA completely destroyed foreign language teaching in the US during the sixties and seventies.)
MasterRussian.com is a collection of websites. Read the boiler-plate User Agreement quite simply they are not responsible if the study of Russian rots your mind. A necessity in today's litiginous world. One of the sites it used to link to was : The Russian Language Mentor "The Technology-Based Training Development Branch of the National Cryptologic School is creating a self-paced, on-site, on-demand Post-B.A./DLI Language Maintenance and Development Curriculum for intermediate to advanced Russian linguists. The Russian Language Mentor (RLM) is the umbrella name for the various curriculum tools as well as their launching pad." Rather slow to load. For some reason, when the Army site changed its URL,. it got dropped from the Master Russian site. So,
You can go directly to the Mighty Ducks(!) of the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio at Monterey, California, and click on their Language Links. You can get the Daily Terrorist Threat too, which will give you the above as well.
Want the Magna Carta in Russian? Or various translations of Hamlet's solliloqui? For those who have gotten beyond the basics and just need sources and materials worth reading (the literary materials provided by most web sites and commercial producers are, well, rather literary), we have Maxim Moshkow's Library, which I highly recommend. Want to read Russian SF? Russian murder mysteries? Karl May westerns in Russian? Babylon 5 scripts translated. The site can be accessed in any of a number of Cyrillic fonts as well as Latin, which means you can not only print up a text in the original but, if you do not want to print out two hundred pages all at once, download the text to disk in Latin font. A straight bar means 'backwards E,' and 'Zh' and 'Sh,' and Shch,' are self-evident. The site has large numbers of Kir Bulychev texts as well. It even has numerous works by Pushkin and Lermontov, despite their ubiquity in print in Russia. Most useful: My own copy of Lermontov is lost in piles of boxes of books in my attic. A. A. Fet is missing.
Russian web sites such as Russkaya Fanastika. give the reader a good overview of how modern Russian is used by its speakers, as well as materials interesting to an SF fan.
In general, Soviet era Russian newspapers fulfilled their socialist duty of misinforming the general public by: 1) Not reporting something at all (The Censor's book of subjects that were off limits was enormous); 2) Printing half-truths in such a way that the reader would come away with a serious of conclusions that were the opposite of what the reader might draw if full facts were printed, and; 3) Lying outright. In over twenty years of reading the Soviet Press (Pravda, Izvestia, Sov. Russiya, I never encountered a story dealing with America or the West that reflected what I knew of the subject. I wish I could not say the same about the American press. Alas, over the last decade, the New York Times has begun to mimic Pravda not only in its politics but its news reporting, while Pravda has become almost a 'real newspaper.'