Russian A2 Everyday Vocabulary: 300 Spoken-Russian Flashcards of Particles and Case Forms

Open this deck expecting an A2 textbook chapter — shopping, weather, daily routine — and you will be confused for about thirty cards. Then черт (damn), мисс (miss), миссис (Mrs.) and убить (to kill) show up, and the real nature of Russian Vocabulary A2 — Everyday becomes obvious: it is a frequency list built from spoken Russian, the kind of language you hear in dialogue rather than read in a course book.

That makes it a much better listening deck than its title suggests, as long as you study it for what it is.

Deck: Russian Vocabulary A2 — Everyday (code WD3547, 300 cards, English front → Russian back).

A sample of the real cards

Notice what these have in common: not one of them is a noun. The deck's centre of gravity is the layer of Russian that textbooks postpone — particles and discourse words: же, ж, уж, ни, вроде, разве, будто, хоть, хотя, пусть, ради, лишь, именно, равно. Around them sit conjunctions and prepositions (перед, против, между, над, кроме, из-за, насчет, при), a full set of pronoun and demonstrative forms (свой/своей/своего/свои/своих, тот, эта, такое, таким, который/которая/которую), verb forms across person and gender (знал/знала/знаем/знаете, говорил/говорила/говорит/говорят/говоришь, могли/могла/могут), and only a handful of concrete nouns — дом, работа, дверь, ночь, помощь, вопрос, правда, мир.

The fronts hide grammar labels, and some hide fixed phrases

Roughly ninety fronts carry a case tag: "that (instrumental) → тем", "my (genitive masculine) → моего", "those (genitive) → тех". Reviewing those as vocabulary is pointless — you are memorising inflections of words you already know. Sort them into a subdeck and review them as a declension drill instead.

More urgent: several backs are fragments of set expressions that mean nothing alone. деле only exists in в самом деле (indeed), виду in иметь в виду (to mean), пор in до сих пор (until now), равно in всё равно (all the same), случае in в случае (in case), порядке in в порядке (in order, fine). Rewrite those six fronts as the whole phrase and they turn from noise into some of the most useful cards in the deck.

Tip: delete the tail and the letter

Two mechanical fixes, both verifiable in ninety seconds.

Cards 295–300 are exact repeats of cards 3, 5, 10, 8, 16 and 14 — говорил, прямо, стоит, своей, лишь, ага. The list was stitched together from two passes over the same corpus and the seam is at the very end. Suspend those six.

Card 246 is "p (letter) → п" — a single stray Cyrillic letter that survived the corpus extraction. Delete it.

While you are there, merge the ё pairs the deck treats as distinct words: нее / неё and еще / ещё.

One genuine homograph worth keeping

Cards 10 ("worth") and 297 ("stands, costs") both show стоит. This one is not an error: сто́ит (stress on the first syllable) means costs, is worth, while стои́т means stands. Mark the stress on both cards — it is the same distinction Russians rely on to tell them apart in speech.

Look up WD3547 in your library on Flip It.

Next step: the B1 deck continues with the same spoken-Russian material at a higher level — Expand Your Russian to B1. For a specialised vocabulary, see Russian Business Vocabulary.