The Pushkin Institute is the oldest, best known, and most prestigious language school in Russia.

Its website now offers interactive Russian courses for free.

This is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared at Russia Beyond The Headlines

The Pushkin State Russian Language Institute in Moscow participated in the Sochi Robotics Days on Nov. 21-23, where it unveiled a website called Education in Russian, interactive lessons, and a robotic Russian language assistant named Vanya. RBTH interviewed the institute’s rector Margarita Rusetskaya about technology, the Russian language, and how foreigners can study free of charge in Russia.

Gleb Fedorov: Am I correct that some courses on the Education in Russian website are free or open for all?

Margarita Rusetskaya: The website is open for anyone who has internet, and it is available from anywhere. Basic courses – for example, Russian at A1 and A2 level – are free. More advanced levels, where a live tutor is required, are not free, because you have to pay for a teacher’s working time.

Furthermore, the website offers professional support modules for teachers, where training is completely free. Right now, there are already 2,500 teachers throughout the world taking that course. Naturally, it costs extra if a teacher wants to get an official diploma.

What we do on the website isn’t just offer a set of games and exercises. We have created a product that can evaluate the educational trajectory of every person who enters the website and, depending on his or her results, accompany him or her, recommend additional exercises, and arrange modules with extra resources.

In order to make that possible, the website was built using the latest developments in programming, linguistics, cyber linguistics, and neurolinguistics.

GF: What technology does it use?

M.R.: For example, we have a project with the company ABBYY, which among other things does artificial speech synthesis on the basis of semantic search engines. In other words, their software lets you automatically assess the accuracy and literacy of a text. These developments are being used on our website in the linguistic module.

GF: You also presented an assistant teacher of Russian – a robot named Vanya. ... What does it do?

M.R.: Robots like Vanya are very good as motivational toys that can be used when you need to attract and maintain the interest of school-age children. Vanya isn’t supposed to provide deep language study, which is why we call him an assistant teacher instead of a teacher. As an assistant, he can help remove the psychological barriers to communication.

