Here is the status of the Russian course in the Duolingo incubator. It has been there for a while... http://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/ru/en/status

Hey, you can't hardly expect them to provide a course for such a minor, exotic language. Maybe you should try Irish or Ukrainian instead?

I'm patiently waiting for their Polish course to progress beyond 17% completion...

Their volunteer translation system may seem unreliable, but it's probably the only way smaller languages will ever get attention. At this point, I'm probably better off picking up some Polish books, learning a bit on my own, and contributing to their project.

If you learn Ukrainian, you should be basically halfway there.

Or maybe Klingon ?

ಠ_ಠ

Any word on getting over the hurdle of using another alphabet on english keyboards?

This is really easy on Mac and iOS.

For iOS, just add the keyboard and it will become available (this is the same way that most people use emojis).

On Mac, you can add the keyboard as well. There is a phonetic keyboard for Russian that I've found to be much easier than the standard layout. I map keyboard switching to ctl+opt+cmd+space, which works pretty well for me. What I really like about Mac is that you can use dictation to read Russian words that you don't need to understand. You will need to download a Russian-specific voice for this, otherwise it will simply read the names of the letters.

Unfortunately you just have to suck it up and learn the layout. If you have a mechanical keyboard you can buy replacement keycaps with both Latin/Cyrillic characters. Otherwise, you can get a set of stickers to put on your keys.

Or just learn to touchtype off the bat.

Depending on your OS, you can also use a phonetic keyboard layout instead of the standard Russian one, but I really strongly recommend learning the standard Russian layout.

That should be easy on mobile devices. At least one of ä, á, à, â, æ, å is necessary for most of the supported languages.

Those characters are still based on the Roman alphabet, though. Non-Roman alphabets such as Cyrillic are trickier. For example, I can copy-and-paste Cyrillic, as in русский, but I don't know offhand how to produce those characters on my keyboard, much less on my iPad or mobile device.

When I travelled round Georgia and Armenia for a couple of weeks I enabled the Russian, Georgian and Armenian keyboard layouts for my phone (it's just a setting, and then a key labelled EN-RU-GE-AR appeared).

With significant effort I could type some Georgian or Armenian into Google Translate -- they are awful, awful scripts. Russian was easier, but not as widespread as I'd expected. I could also let other people type things, and they all know about switching between layouts, since they do it all the time to type email addresses etc.

You can add Russian as an input language and use a keyboard shortcut to switch between Russian and English (usually alt+shift or super+space), and then it's just a matter of learning the keyboard layout.

If you're learning Russian, you have to learn a new alphabet anyway, a new layout isn't that much more trouble.

On your iPad or iPhone, you'd just add a Russian keyboard ...