Links around the net to learn about Russian conjunctions

The lessons move very quickly, so they are not appropriate for a true beginner. The CDs are helpful, but not really enough practice, and the words are not broken down or said slowly, making it tricky to get the pronunciation correct. Grammar explanations are clear, but there is not enough practice to apply and learn the new information.

Rating: (3 / 5)

I've been wrestling with these CDs for about 2 months. No attempt to slow down the Russian speakers or break the words down by syllables to assist with pronouncing them right. I borrowed the Pimsleur Russian course and found it much more user-friendly for helping with pronunciation and more practical than trying to memorize word and phrase lists while driving.

Rating: (2 / 5)

I purchased the Living Language "Ultimate Russian, Beginner-Intermediate" Book & CDs, after first having started with it from the public library. It moves at a fairly fast pace (good for me but not for some). Be prepared to listen to the CDs with a player that allows you to easily rewind and replay short phrases repeatedly. You will do a LOT of that with this course! If that will annoy you, buy only the book and go with a different CD+book set for your main course. The exercises are fairly good, and there is an answer key in the back, but you will occasionally require other materials in order to fully grasp the reasons for some answers.

You will DEFINITELY need multiple materials; no single course is enough. You will also definitely need audio materials (CD, tape, or whatever) that are targeted for whatever dialect of English you speak. I grew up in the U.S., so I supplemented "Ultimate Russian" with Daphne West's "Teach Yourself Russian" -- only the textbook, because the CD seems targeted to UK English. If you're British, do it the other way around: use West's book/CD package and supplement with the book-only version of "Ultimate."

In addition to West's book, I am also using
- "The New Penguin Russian Course" (very systematic but also written for a British "ear"),
- The Oxford New Russian Dictionary,
- Pimsleur "Russian 1" audio course (checked out from the library).

The Pimsleur materials provide you with practice hearing correct native pronunciation and grammar, and with trying to speak in the same way. The other materials provide you with a broader vocabulary, an intellectual understanding of the grammar, and with practice reading and writing. Believe me, you will want to work on ALL of these together if you want to learn Russian for anything more than a few phrases during a business trip!

[I began learning Russian on my own in May 2008: this review is from the perspective of a beginner with (currently) only 4 months experience with the materials and the language. My goal is to become fluent without an American accent... with no particular deadline.]

Rating: (4 / 5)

This is a superb language text. As a hobby, I've read the Spanish, French, and German texts in the same series. Learning was fun, and easy. I highly recommend these Ultimate Language texts.

Rating: (5 / 5)

I was past this learning stage many years ago and bought it just to refresh myself.
Dialogs were good but translations were often a little off. Sometimes just wrong. Can not translate waiter to waitress. There is a difference.
Accent marks in the Russian dialog were occasionally wrong. This can make a big difference in what is being said.

Rating: (3 / 5)

I have several different formats of materials which I have learned russian language. I have noticed that within learning, everything requires time spent pronouncing the words or writing the words out.
This course gives the user the advantage of having a written format and a glossary and AUDIO CD's of how the words are pronounced.
If you are looking for a low cost way to learn Russian language, in my opinion, this is the best way I could advise anyone to attempt learning... it has the book and the glossary and it explains in step by step detail how to learn the language. I like the compact disk audio format as I use it in the car when I am commuting.
I have found this course invaluable to me and well worth the money spent.
It takes time to learn language and it is something that cannot be accomplished within a short time. In following the steps described in the manual I believe that one can learn the basic words quite easily.
I recommend this course as a must have, low cost way to communicate in Russian.

Rating: (5 / 5)

My background is - I spoke very basic Russian having spent a year in the CIS 12 years ago. Then recently I got a job working in Russia so I decided I needed a course to get me up to the level where I could survive without an interpreter.
I would recommend this course for the following reasons:
1) It is broken up into bite-sized chunks (40 lessons) so you can reasonable aim to complete a lesson in a day or so, and get a feeling of having accomplished something without getting too worn out
2) The conversations and CDs are great for learning how Russians speak at normal speed, their intonation etc. I don't see how you could use this book without them
3) The grammar is well explained and clear - you don't have to spend an hour studying their explaination of how a case is used before the light clicks on.
4) There is a follow-on course (the advanced course) which is structured in the same format with CDs, so there is something to aim for after this, and once you have got into the rhythm of this one, you don't have to switch to an unfamiliar format.
5) The second review set of CDs, which explain everything verbally are great ... it helps hammer home some of the more complicated concepts.

Now the downsides:

1) The course does tend to skimp on some critical pieces of the Russian languge. Verbs like vzyat' and berat' (to take) are critical but skipped over lightly.
2) The exercises are too short and too hard. Too Hard?!?!?! Yes, they give a simple example in the grammar then expect you to be able to translate the most complicated phrases instantly. More progressively difficuly examples may be the answer, or more explanation of the complexities prior to the exercises, perhaps.
3) The translations are often innaccurate. A good way I found of testing my ability for each section was to read the English translation then put it back into Russian and see how close I was. But the English translation attempts to be too vernacular, so your translation is radically different from the Russian version.

But its a great course. If you are learning Russian, you will need more than this course. I bought a dictionary that contains 5000 Russian words, all inflections, a regular dictionary and Schaum's Russian Grammar outlines.

I completed this course and definitely recommend it.

Rating: (4 / 5)

After reading the two poor reviews of this product, I came very close to canceling my order. But thanks to gift cards and assorted discounts, I spent only $10 on it and decided to give it a chance. Good call!

For starters, the other reviewers completely miss one very important point. The producers of this course had enough wisdom to record the audio on compact discs. That may not sound like a big deal, but believe me, I have scoured Amazon and at least three other Web sites looking for affordable Russian courses that combine printed material with audio training aides. The audio component of every one I found had been recorded on a cassette tape. In fact, I just purchased "Making Progress in Russian," the most widely used second-year-Russian textbook in the U.S., and the introduction explains that the supplementary materials include, sigh, cassettes. So even if the eight Living Language Russian CDs were downright lousy -- and they're far from it -- they would still be superior to 95 percent of what's out there. For the reviewer who complained that the dialogues go too fast to be of any use, I have two words: replay button.

As for the text, I agree with much of the two-star review. What the book lacks in visual aesthetics, it more than makes up for in quality of information. In that respect, it has much in common with "Russian for Everybody," which is now out of print but was by many accounts the gold standard of introductory Russian textbooks. Sadly, the author of the English version of "Russian for Everybody" died in 1995, and copies of the book are now agonizingly rare. Copies of the recorded supplement (consisting of two cassettes, BTW) are even rarer. The Living Language course fills the void. The book is uncannily similar to "Russian for Everybody" in other ways, too, right down to the chapter in which various words, idioms and grammar concepts are introduced. Occasionally, explanations of a grammatical concept aren't as in-depth as one might like, but the chapters are reader-friendly precisely because they don't try to teach everything all at once. Furthermore, the dialogues on the CDs make almost perfect sense once you understand the grammar points taught in the book.

The other main criticism of this course is that many of the words included in the vocab lists are rarely used. I shared that concern, so I bought a copy of the "Russian Learners' Dictionary," which lists, in order, the 10,000 most frequently used words in Russian. Cross-reference the vocab words with the learners' dictionary, and it's easy to tell which ones are essential and which ones you can do without knowing.

Russian is such a difficult language, especially in its pronunciation and grammar, that there is no magic bullet. Living Language's book and CDs get you off to a good start, though. I definitely recommend this course, and I hope that prospective buyers will weigh the negative comments against my favorable review.

Rating: (5 / 5)

I wrote a review of the cassette tape version of this book, and felt that it was important to post my review under the CD version. It has been a year since I posted my original review, and I feel that it is worth repeating here.

Good luck trying to use "Ultimate Russian" to learn Russian, unless you already have a good foundation in Russian from other materials or courses! Even then, you'll find that you have to use those other materials to PRACTICE USING your Russian, as this course provids very little of that. This "course" is primarily a grammar textbook with half-hearted attempts to show you how to actually use the language through dialogues at the beginning of each chapter that are so short and non-comprehesive as to be basically worthless.

I bought this course 2 years ago just before I came to Russia from the US (I currently live in Russia). I spent 4 or so weeks trying to learn Russian from this book, but found it to be exceedingly difficult, and stopped using the book when I started taking private lessons. Now, after 2 years of private lessons and after having become reasonably competent in the language, I can see how pointless it was to try learning Russian through a "course" consisting primarily of grammar tables and explanations. After 4 weeks of diligent work with this book, it has basically sat on my shelf for 2 years. I haven't even used it much as a reference work, because there are so many better reference materials available.

While the coverage of grammar is very comprehensive, there's no way you're going to learn how to read, write, speak, and understand the language without PRACTICE using the language, and that's what this course fails to provide. The dialogues at the beginning of each chapter are basically useless. Not only don't they contain many of the vocabulary words in that chapter's vocabulary list, they contain at most one instance of each verb in that chapter, conjugated in a single form. You might as well not include the dialogues at all, if you're not going to show the student all of the most common forms in which the student is likely to encounter the word. Being that the tapes are heavily based on the dialogues, they're not much help, either. You basically listen and repeat the dialogues, which, as I've said, aren't very comprehensive.

I also don't like the organization of the book into themed chapters like a traveler's phrasebook. Being that this book is "2 years' worth of study," that means that there's a good deal of useful and necessary vocabulary and information that you won't get to until the end of your two years, assuming you go through the book chapter by chapter.

As a "course" for actually learning and being able to USE Russian, it's basically useless. I didn't give this course the lowest possible rating because it does contain a very comprehensive review of Russian grammar. However, if you're just looking for grammar reference materials, there are much better organized and more understandable Russian grammar materials on the market (such as Modern Russian, An Advanced Grammar Course, by Derek Offord), and I would recommend buying those, instead.

Rating: (2 / 5)

I have been learning Russian for about nine months now and purchased four different programs. I was extremely disappointed with this learning package. It's advertised as a complete program with book, workbook, and audio, which is exactly what I was looking for. What I found out was that these folks don't have a clue on how to write a book or record an audio program to learn a language, at least their Ultimate Russia series. The "learn on the go" CD set is completely useless. The speakers go over random phrases in English and Russian only one time! Is it possible to hear the phrase in Russian, say it once and then remember? No way.
I also bought the Living Language "Russian Complete Course", which is better than the Ultimate Russian, but again, not that great. I also bought the Nachalo, When in Russia book, CDs and Workbook, which are better, but they don't include the answers, so it's a little frustrating. By far the best program is Pimsleur, which has taken my Russian to at least basic conversation, but unfortunety Pimsleur doesn't have a book/workbook to accompany it. I'd recommend anyone out there to get the Pimsleur and hire a teacher with their own material to learn the language and reading and writing.
I'm really surprised their isn't a quality comprehensive self-paced program out their to learn Russian!

Rating: (1 / 5)