Hi everyone, I'm James. I make Mishka with my girlfriend Lera, who's a native speaker and a certified Russian tutor.

Since we launched in the spring, Mishka has started at A1. The most common thing people told us was that it was too hard to start from zero. So we built First Steps, a course for complete beginners:

- The alphabet taught by sound, not letter names. Lera recorded every letter herself

- 12 units of short lessons: greetings, introducing yourself, numbers, your first verbs, talking about your day

- It ends with you reading your first real Russian story

- There's a placement test, so you can skip ahead if you already know some basics

It's on iOS and Android. If you try it, we would really love to hear your thoughts on it and if there is anything we can do to improve!