Russian Programs in Seattle, Washington State

Learn Russian at Seattle Language Academy:
Seattle Language Academy is based in the Fremont area of Seattle. SLA's student body includes high school students preparing for college; college students preparing for study abroad; adults of all ages preparing to travel oversees, exploring family history and heritage, or studying for personal enrichment; and professionals motivated by the demands of the global workplace.

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Full Immersion Russian Program; Business Russian Classes; One-to-One Russian Lessons; Group Russian Courses; Intensive Russian Program.

Within the Indo-European language family, Russian is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It is the national language of Russia, is one of the five official languages of the United Nations, and is spoken as a first or second language in the now independent states of the former Soviet Union. These Russian-speaking republics include the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Latvia, Moldova, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Georgia and Tajikistan.

According to tradition, the Russian alphabet was devised by the missionaries Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. First used for liturgical purposes - the translation of the Christian scriptures into Old Church Slavonic - it was later adapted for writing Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian and even some non-Slavic languages of central Asia. While linguists distinguish three major dialects within Russia, the basis of modern Russian is the dialect of Moscow, since the fifteenth century the cultural and economic center of the country. The rapid westernization of Russian culture under Peter the Great (1682-1725) and the adoption into Russian of many words from French and German led to an intense internal debate as to what constituted the national language.

The writer Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), with his vast literary output of lyrical and epic poetry, essays, criticism, folk songs and fairy tales, achieved a synthesis of old and new Russian and settled the debate. Russian literature, founded on and made possible by Pushkin's legacy, is one of the richest and most expressive in the world. It includes such writers as Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gorky and has been a strong impetus to the study of Russian. The contributions of Russians in the twentieth and twenty first centuries in the fields of art, music, dance and drama, science and exploration have been considerable. During the Cold War, the study and knowledge of Russian was of obvious importance for political reasons. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian remains one of the world's most important languages.