Often two different things sum up. This just agained happened two me. I have the wish and need to learn Russian, already for quite a while. I even have a budget ready to take evining lessons, but so far my appointments did not let it make happen without too many interruptions (especially in the beginning). Finally things will be different in September, but this is just a side node.

At the moment I am also reading a book from a friend of mine, Superhirn by Boris Nikolai Konrad (it is in German). Well, the title is a bit hm-hm, but in fact it is about mnemo technics, i.e. how to train your abilities to memorize things. While he gives personal context and some historic lessons, there are of course also chapters about those methods. Already thce first of those chapters gives advice on how to memorize words, especially foreign words. To finish the bridge: he points to a web service that helps learning languages based on this method. It is memrise.

So while I was out walking with my son, I decided to give it a try and installed the Android App on my Jolla phone. I signed up and could start right ahead with a basic Russian course. Since I am not totally blank and know cyrillic letters and some basic words, getting into was very easy, I could speed on until I found some more challenging tasks. All in all it is fun, a single level does not take too long and can be done while you would idle (e.g. when my 2yo son is analyzing the movements of ants).

The method is based on pictures (everything in menmo technics is, as i understood). They indeed are really helpful, when you try to learn unknown and/or difficult to remember words or phrases. Often they are in a way funny or remarkable, but sometimes there is no good pick. Or you would have a better on based on your mother tongue. Still no problem, you just need to imagine them :)

Speaking about the mother tongue: on the desktop website you have the possibility to specify your mother tongue. There is quite an amount of different courses, many in English, but a good portion of "German to Russian" as well. Now I did not see an option to define your mother tongue in the app, where i started with. Maybe it solely relies on the system language of your device? Well, not a big problem, but sometimes not too handy either.