Beginners' Portuguese and Russian

Portuguese and Russian at beginner level opens two of the world's most significant and widely spoken languages to students without prior knowledge of either. Portuguese is the language of Portugal, Brazil, and the wider Lusophone world, spoken by hundreds of millions of people across four continents and connected to rich and varied literary traditions. Russian is the primary language of one of the world's major powers, with a literary and intellectual heritage that produced Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and some of the most celebrated poetry, music, and thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Studying both at the University of Oxford over four years builds genuine bilingual competence alongside deep literary and cultural knowledge.

You will receive rigorous training in both languages from beginner level, developing proficiency in reading, writing, and spoken communication alongside sustained engagement with literary and cultural texts. The programme allows considerable flexibility: as well as reading broadly across the respective literatures, you can focus on particular periods from the medieval to the present day, or explore options in linguistics, philology, film, or gender studies. Oxford's tutorial system places demanding intellectual expectations on you, requiring independent work and extended argument in small-group and one-to-one sessions with leading researchers in both language areas.

A typical entry tariff of 184 points reflects the high competitive standards of the Oxford modern languages programmes. The combination of two major world languages and the analytical precision Oxford's teaching demands produces graduates who are exceptionally well placed for careers in diplomacy, international journalism, translation and interpreting, academia, publishing, international law, and business with connections to Lusophone or Russian-speaking markets. Many continue to doctoral research in one or both of the languages they have studied.