Grammar terrain guide

The Map of Russianка́рта ру́сского язы́ка

Every fundamental system, sorted into five stages of the climb. Not drills, not irregulars. Just the terrain, and where you stand on it.

Russian front-loads its difficulty into morphology: cases, aspect, and shifting stress. That is the hard part, and it is concentrated. Everywhere else it is simpler than English: no articles, no present-tense "to be", nearly phonetic spelling, flexible word order, only three tenses. Brutal in the endings. Merciful almost everywhere else.
● YOU ARE HERE: end of Tier 2, pushing into Tier 3. Most of Tier 3 is introduced but not yet reflex.
solid introduced ahead
0.90x
01 Foundations solid

Name things and make a simple present-tense statement.

Alphabet & sounds
Reading Cyrillic, the hard/soft vowel pairs, basic pronunciation.
Gender recognition
Reading masculine, feminine, neuter off the ending.
Present tense, regular verbs
Conjugating a standard verb across the six persons.
The nominative
The dictionary/subject case. Your starting point for everything.
No articles, no present "to be"
"I am a student" is just я студе́нт. Two systems English has that you get to skip.
02 Elementary solid

Build correct sentences, still thinking through each ending.

All six cases
Nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, prepositional. The engine.
с triggers instrumental: с жено́й
Prepositions govern case
Each preposition demands a specific case, and в/на switch case for motion vs location.
Past tense
The easy one: marks gender and number, not person. был / была́ / бы́ли.
Both futures
Imperfective with бу́ду plus infinitive; perfective just conjugated directly.
Aspect (the concept)
Imperfective (process, habit) vs perfective (completed whole). You understand the split.
приезжа́ть (impf) / прие́хать (pf)
1st vs 2nd conjugation
Two ending systems (-ешь vs -ишь). Every verb belongs to one.
03 Intermediate in progress

Grammar stops being a lookup and starts being reflex.

Aspect by instinct
Choosing the right aspect without deriving it. The jump from knowing to feeling.
Imperative
Commands. Three predictable endings from the present stem (-й / -и / -ь).
иди́ со мной = come with me
Reflexive verbs (-ся)
Reflexive, passive, reciprocal, and lexically-bound uses. You have a dedicated file.
спра́вишься = you'll manage
Conditional (бы + past)
"Would" statements, plus е́сли conditionals. Mechanically simple.
где / куда́ / отку́да
Static location vs motion toward vs motion away. Gateway to the motion system.
Animacy
Alive-ness changes the accusative: animate copies genitive, inanimate copies nominative.
Stem mutations
Consonants shifting in conjugation (г→ж, к→ч, с→ш).
Particles (же, ну, ли)
The small words that carry tone, emphasis, and indirect questions.
04 Advanced ahead

The written-register machinery.

Verbs of motion, prefixed
One-directional vs habitual (идти́/ходи́ть), then prefixes stacking meaning on top.
Numbers govern case
The number sets the case of the noun after it. A genuinely hard corner.
оди́н стол · два стола́ · пять столо́в
Comparatives & short adjectives
"Bigger / biggest", and the predicate-only short form (он рад).
Indefinite particles (-то / -нибу́дь)
"Someone / anyone / something." The specific-vs-any distinction.
Participles & verbal adverbs
"The running man", "having said". Compressed, bookish, mostly written.
05 Conversational live skill

Not a grammar tier. Live operation, where the grammar goes invisible.

Idiom & set phrases
Saying it the way a native would, not the way the grammar allows.
Register switching
Formal, casual, military, slang. Reading the room and matching it.
Colloquial reductions & diminutives
How speech actually compresses, and the affectionate -ик/-очка layer.
Real-time production
Building sentences under pressure. Your Arma servers are exactly this training ground.