Привет! Hi!

My Yozhin family drawings were so popular on Facebook that I decided to make them their own website! This summer, as I see how much Russian I can learn from a textbook in preparation for Slavic 1 next semester (and to stay sane for 3 months out of school! I live for academia), I will make posts with the Yozhins that illustrate the basics of the language (the alphabet, declensions, names, numbers, etc.) I will also make less didactic posts to tell the stories of the Yozhins. I hope you all enjoy!

An introduction to the Yozhins for anyone who stumbles across this page who isn't my friend on Facebook:

In the process of teaching myself the Cyrillic alphabet for fun (I came under the sway of Russomania last year) a few months back, I came across the Russian word for hedgehog, "ёж" ("yozh"). A brief e-conversation on the subject of Russian hedgehogs ensued with my hedgehog-loving friend Rachael and I began doing quick drawings of cartoon hedgehogs speaking Russian (the few words and phrases I know so far) in any free moment I could find (as a busy college student, many of these "free moments" were ones in which I should have been taking notes or studying, but oh well). I used a Photoshop-like program to color them in and used Facebook to share with my friends and family. I got such a positive response (and genuinely loved the drawings myself) that I decided to turn the drawings into a bigger project with the aim of helping myself (and maybe others) learn Russian (I'm taking classes with the aim of minoring in Russian literature) in a way that's cute and funny (how I think learning a language should be).