Claims to be suitable for beginner through to intermediate through to advanced. For students who need a quick and easy to use reference grammar guide with exercises and answers.

This is not a CD for beginners. I have studied Russian at school 30 years ago and simply wanted to refresh my memory. This CD was perfect for that. Except for the first chapter, I wouldn't recommend it to people who are just starting to learn the language .

Rating: (5 / 5)

Pimsleur is simply the best most useful way to learn a language. It's practical, actually fun, challenging and effective at getting you SPEAKING a language instead of staring at a page trying to memorize rules and vocabulary.

The need to react quickly and the variety of things they throw at you really cement the knowledge and make it instinctive and not just intellectual. It's not cheap, but there is no other substitute out there that comes close to this.

You will need a good book in addition to help formally learn grammar rules and you'll need to learn more vocabulary than you can on an audio program, but when it comes to hitting the ground running and internalizing a language, Pimsleur is the way to go. SIX STARS.

Rating: (5 / 5)

It is a good product for acquiring pronunciation skills, but it would have been better if the supplied manual had included at least the Russian texts of the dialogues. If you are trying to learn Russian on your own, you will need at least a grammar text, a dictionary and perhaps a verb conjugation text. I find it easier if I can visualise the written Russian while trying to speak it.

Rating: (4 / 5)

When you learned your native language, what was the most effective grammar lesson? For most people, it had nothing to do with memorizing rules, reading grammar texts, and surviving grammar lectures. You learn the most grammar by repeatedly HEARING grammatically correct sentences. By the time you were old enough to read, you already instinctively understood most of the grammar rules you would now be taught in school.

That is why the Pimsleur method is the cornerstone of my Russian study program. Memorizing a grammar book is not my idea of a fun Saturday. However, listening to these Russians and being taught how to construct grammatically correct sentences without memorizing the rules is a fantastic way to begin learning a languange.

In addition, these CD's will train your ear to comprehend Russian words and accents. No book can train you in this way. To properly and thoroughly learn a language, you need to verbalize it, visualize it, and hear it. Pimsleur's CD's and booklet will give you the fundamentals to do all three from day one, and will continue to develop your skills to a respectable level.

My Listmania contains all the resources I have used or are currently using to learn Russian. There are several valuable resources out there. I believe Pimsleur is the most valuable, and it remains the guiding force of my Russian program.

Rating: (4 / 5)

Pimsleur courses are the best way to start learning a language because they teach you useful stuff from the beginning, thus keeping you motivated to learn more. Sure, they are not enough to achieve real fluency, but neither is a grammar book without audio, especially when it comes to Russian, which is a rather difficult language to pronounce correctly. Besides, unless you are exceptionally self-disciplined, learning just from a textbook is very boring, in fact too boring for most, which means you will quit altogether. As to the price, I will only say it need not necessarily be expensive.

As to the suggestion made by someone that renting subtitled movies is a better choice than a good audio course, I must say that is the worst language-learning advice that has ever grated my ears. As someone who understands several foreign languages (French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish), I can tell you that subtitles rarely correspond exactly to the actual dialogue, but are instead abbreviated versions of it, usually also cleansed of profanity, etc. Besides, when you hear a whole sentence in an unfamiliar language, it's impossible to make heads or tails of it: you can't tell what is a verb, a noun, etc. Neither will you realize it when a speaker uses non-standard pronunciation or grammar because of a lack of education or regional accent. And you won't even hear the phonemes (sounds) of the language correctly unless you first get your ears used to them, and it's much easier to do that through a specially designed medium, such as a Pimsleur course, than through material designed for native (or at least fluent) speakers, such as a movie.

Bottomline: you need an audio course to properly learn a foreign language and Pimsleur is the best. Get it!

Rating: (5 / 5)

This is my third Pimisleur language. Great program. But cd case now has
a problem. The cd case for the 30 lesson editions were designed for the
user guide booklet and reading booklet to hold the cds in place. (My
earlier purchased language sets with this arrangement work great and do
not have a problem.) The publisher has changed the guide booklet to a
fold out. With this simple change they created a major problem for
protecting the cds. Now the first half of the cds will not stay in place. The
second half of the cds was designed to use clear plastic stays. They
work great. The first half of the cds will NOT stay in place and do fall
out. The act of carrying the case across the room will have the cds
sliding inside the case. Great care must be used opening the case or the
cds roll across the floor. Pimsleur will replace a damaged cd. The
plastic stay will not work on the front half of the set, only the back half.
They have no solution for the disks falling out. They suggested I buy a
cd case and move my cds into that case. My suggestion to them is they
fix the problem. I paid for a set that now has improper working storing
case.

5 star spoken language program. 1 star for case problem.

Any suggestion on how to hold the cds in the publisher's case is
welcome.

Rating: (1 / 5)

I already speak English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and have studied Latin. I bought a Berlitz book some years back and tried to use it to study Russian but soon gave up. It was a good thing, too. The Pimsleur course taught me that the Berlitz book was teaching the WRONG PRONUNCIATION for at least half the words.

After 4 days with the Quick and Simple set of CDs, I was able to invite a Russian girl to go to a hotel with me. And she said I spoke Russian quite well. That was after 4 days with the Pimsleur course! I ran out and bought the 30 lesson course. Of course!

But I do have a few questions. Why in the Quick and Simple course do they pronounce "wine" as "vinnAH" and in the Russian I course do they pronounce it as "vinnOH"? In the Q&S they say "wee-pit" for drink, and in the Russian I they just say "pit". Why?

Seriously, y'all quit arguing over whether Pimsleur has a better linguistic theory, and just get the CDs and start listening to them. I did it in the car, and it works fine. Pretty soon you are answering the questions all by yourself and shocked at how fast you are learning. Buy a Russian dictionary so you can look up some of the words that may be hard to hear well because they have too many soft consonants, such as the word for "beer".

Then, after you have gone through all those lessons, you can tackle a heavier-duty study of grammar and vocabulary. But meanwhile, you can make Russian girls giggle and maybe even go out with you.

Rating: (4 / 5)

I sure hope you've finished reading the positive reviews, and will now come to this review, and see the other side.

This CD set is garbage. It reminds me of the Diet Pill commercials on late night TV, where they say, who spends $200 on a diet pill? Someone who really needs to lose weight, and needs a pill that is effective.

Only the pill they are selling over the counter, is just some herbs you could get at the local health food store for $5.

People spend a lot, to show how much they really want to learn, and they really badly want a 'best' solution to be out there.

But Pimsleur didn't invent listening and repeating and you don't need these CD's to listen and repeat. You can go buy some Russian movies, with subtitles, and watch the movie. Hit pause every once in a while and repeat. Use Russian subtitles to read along with the speaker. You did learn Cyrillic right? If you didn't...you'll have to, YOU HAVE TO, if you want to learn Russian.

So get a book, read and listen every day, and don't spend this amount of money.

I went through this Pimsleur method, I wasted a lot of money to pick up a few words. The fact is you need thousands of words to speak in Russian, probably about 15 - 25, 000 words. At the rate Pimsleur teaches you words, you'll go broke.

Movies, on the other hand...can be as cheap as $10 each, and each of them has about 1,000 lines of separate dialogue... $10 buys you way more than you get in all 3 Pimsleur Courses.

What makes me so angry about Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, and the others, is they sell you on a dream. You spend the money, because you would gladly spend $500 to acquire Russian.

But repeat after this, you won't learn Russian with this course. You won't learn it. You won't know it. You won't even be close. So congratulate yourself all you want...but at level III Pimsleur you are still a complete novice, who cannot hold a conversation that will last even a minute. Go listen to Crocodile Gena's Song...(the Russian happy birthday)...you won't even understand the simplest of Birthday songs.

So...In short, save your money. Buy the grammar books, and start immersing yourself in Russian. Don't bother with this expensive detour.

Rating: (1 / 5)

Fabulous program for actually learning how to SPEAK the language. To get full benefit from the course you should repeat the lessons several times to have them ingrained in you memory. The lessons are very well done. They are systematically progressive. They slowly add additional material while constantly reusing material from prior lessons that forces you recall what you have learned. This ingrains the material into your memory for practical use, not just memorization. The best part about this course is it is a truly a speaking course. You learn to pronounce correctly. I have had many native Russian speakers compliment me over and over about my pronunciation having little or no accent, which I credit to this course.

Rating: (5 / 5)

This course is great, i have followed a distance course and picked up some basic grammar rules and some vocabulary. This course is a good help if you not can listen and speak to natives where you live. You really develope your russian-skills with this. It teaches how to speak and hold a conversation, only thing it lacks in is that it is hard to remember how to prononce something because there is no textbook following it. You can use it everywhere, my tip is to get a mp3-player. It gets 4 stars.

Rating: (4 / 5)