A selection of Russian phrases to learn and master - buying food,eating out,money,restaurants,transport,greetings,saying hello and goodbye,counting

I use this book/CD set in a beginning conversation class at City College of San Francisco and have found it to be practical, engaging, and quite challenging for the students. We cover the material in detail and I supplement it with many exercises, which are necessary for developing fluency, but the book itself is outstanding, at least when used in a class context. After the first semester, several of my beginning students went to Russia and were able to identify important signs, ask for a few food items in a restaurant, express a few desires and hope to understand some basic responses to their questions. Situations and expressions given in the book allow students to enjoy role-playing while learning essential constructions. I was amazed at how much they managed to accomplish by the end of the year.

For a student studying alone, the program is quite challenging, but worth trying. The booklet, however, fell apart almost immediately. Both my students and I have resorted to photocopying and sometimes enlarging individual pages of the text, as we used them intensively.

Rating: (5 / 5)

I think this would be a great book for someone who has already studied Russian for a while, or someone who is just brushing up their language skills. But the book states it is suitable for a beginner, though I think the learning curve is a little too steep for most. This does a good job of teaching you how to read Cyrillic in the first chapter, but then it goes into some pretty hard to grasp concepts by the third chapter. Granted, Russian isn't easy, but coupled with all the vocabulary, and dialogues this can just be overwhelming for the absolute beginner. The dialogues have quite a few words that aren't in the glossary, and they take different cases than the nominative (which makes it hard to look things up in a dictionary if you're not very familiar with cases). They cover alot of ground in each chapter, which would probably work pretty well for someone already more familiar with the language.

I have to agree with the previous reviewer about the binding. My book started falling apart within only a week of using it.

Rating: (3 / 5)

While the content is excellent. The binding of the book is very bad and has began to come apart already after approx 4 uses.

Rating: (3 / 5)

This is actually a decent little course, but if your budget allows, the Living Language Russian Basic/Intermediate course is better and has an advanced course for further study. But if you're on a tight budget, this is actually pretty good.

Rating: (4 / 5)

The good things about this course are its systematic approach to learning the language, and its combination of written and audio material. The one shortcoming is that the course covers quite a bit of ground, and there is not enough reinforcement of previously learned concepts.

Also, be aware that this is mostly a written course, and the material on the CDs is an adjunct. This is _not_ a course you can do in your car.

Rating: (4 / 5)

I have been studying Russian, on my own, for about a year. I have tried Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and many other courses. The other courses, although very good for what they are, seemed to be lacking in one area or another. I also seemed to get bored with the other programs. With this book and CDs, I wanted to keep learning. This course will teach you all the aspects of beginning Russian, at the fastest pace and the cheapest price, which is why I chose it as my favorite Russian learning course.

Rating: (5 / 5)

This book is really worth the money. It comes with 5 hours of audio on CD or cassette. The narrator sounds like a Russian Arnold Schwarzenegger (complete with the occasional witticism).
I started learning Russian from Nicholas Brown's Penguin Russian course, which is a very professional book, but alas doesn't come with tapes. Sure, Brown gives good phonetic transcriptions, but you need the actual audio to reassure yourself you're actually saying the right thing! Nothing in language learning is so conspicuous as a good or bad accent, and I'm glad I have this unpretentious Oxford course to help me along.

Rating: (5 / 5)

This is an excellent way to get started in Russian. The blend of exercises in audio and written gives the student a lot of exposure to spoken and written Russian in very short order. One thing I really like about this is the mixing of functional and literary Russian in both the book and the tapes or CD. This will prepare the student for a variety of experiences in the language, both from a cultural and business perspective.

I will not say you get a lot of cultural exposure from the tapes, but rather, you will be prepared to access cultural material such as Russian magazines, newspapers, television, and the like. It isnt the fish, but rather the teaching how to fish.

The functional aspect of the course avoids stock phrasing, per se, but teaches you how to put things together in order to achieve the goal, such as buyin Pravda, or ice cream, or navigating the Metro. So you can get some work done, and have a good time while you are at it.

I would not say that one becomes an expert after finishing this course (I will let you know when I finish it.) But I am already beginning to enough in Pravda to figure out what the article is about. It is a great start on learning Russian as far as I am concerned.

Rating: (5 / 5)