I’ve been immersing in Russian for 2 years, and throughout the entire process, YouTube has been my favorite source for listening practice. It is full of interesting and high-quality content, but it took me many months of prodding the algorithm and getting recommendations from friends to find the channels I enjoy the most. Here are a few of my favorites.
Need more recommendations for content in Russian? Check out the original post on my blog here!
Орк-подкастер
- Difficulty: Easy
- Matching Subs: No
- Genre: Gaming
The OG vtuber, Орк-подкастер originally gained popularity for his World of Warcraft machinima, and he now has a wide variety of quality, pun-laden gaming content with a slight focus on MMOs across three different channels—highly-edited news and reviews on the main channel, less-polished videos on the secondary channel, and countless hours of gameplay recordings on the stream channel.
Wicker Mag
- Difficulty: Medium
- Matching Subs: No
- Genre: Video essays
Марина of Wicker Mag creates short (~10-30min) video essays on a wide variety of topics. Most either cover pop-culture events and trends, such as the Satanic panic of the 1980s or the ties between cyberpunk and religion, often through the lens of a recent film, or retell strange religious or supernatural beliefs and stories from history.
ДжоШизо
- Difficulty: Easy
- Matching Subs: No
- Genre: Podcasts, anime, film reviews
Dubbed content often has simpler language and clearer audio, and can be a great place to start immersing. You might already be a fan of Trash Taste, an English podcast where three YouTubers discuss their life in Japan and (on occasion) anime. Thanks to professional dubber Джо and his team, a lot of Russian-speakers are fans, too. Джо also dubs videos by Gigguk, Nostalgia Critic, and occasionally other YouTubers, and he sometimes creates his own videos and streams games on Twitch.
Moonlighter
- Difficulty: Medium
- Matching Subs: No
- Genre: Anime reviews
Moonlighter’s videos are few but long, high-quality, and dense with (often visual) humor. Most of his videos are anime reviews, and he goes through the plot in thorough detail, so it’s highly recommended that you watch the show first if you want to avoid spoilers.
Phonetic Fanatic
- Difficulty: Medium
- Matching Subs: Yes
- Genre: Language learning
I have yet to come across a better resource for learning Russian phonetics in detail than Phonetic Fanatic, whose videos are intended to teach Russian speakers how to make their English pronunciation more native-like. PF explains new terminology as he uses it, and his videos are full of examples and diagrams that make it easy to understand the mechanical and acoustic differences between Russian and English pronunciation.
Микитко сын Алексеев
- Difficulty: Hard
- Matching Subs: No
- Genre: Linguistics, history, culture
The better my Russian gets, the more interested I’ve become in learning about the history and little quirks of the language. Никита discusses various aspects of Russian and other Slavic languages—including the development of modern orthography, the etymology of various words, rare accents and dialects, and how the grammar, pronunciation, and usage of Russian have changed over time.
