While the School does not offer a major in Russian, it provides two accelerated courses on-line, designed to develop a reading knowledge of Russian within one year. These courses are RUSS3002/6002 Reading Russian for Academic Purposes I and RUSS3003/6003 Reading Russian for Academic Purposes II.

Russia is well-known for its poets, novelists and playwrights, of course, but Russian is also a very important language of science and scholarship. Students in academic disciplines as diverse as geography, economics, biology, chemistry and political science often find that there is much literature in their fields written in Russian, and not translated. For students studying Russian history, politics or literature, the need is self-evident. Russian is a member of the Slavonic group of languages, which means that it is an Indo-European language, and related to English, though less closely than, say, French or German.

Using the web-based resources provided, you will quickly master the Russian alphabet, recognise familiar international words in their Russian guise, and move on to an understanding of the workings of the language and an ability to tackle simple Russian texts in your area of expertise with the aid of a dictionary.