Top drawer language book
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This book is absolutely superb. It takes you from total beginner level, covering the cyrillic alphabet and basic pronunciation, to around intermediate level. It covers all six grammatical cases in Russian in a nicely paced way, as well as a good amount of vocab.
The best things about the book are the length of the lessons and units and the CDs. There are 14 units, each made up of five lessons. The first two introduce the grammar and vocab, while the third practices it. These first three lessons are based around listening, pronunciation practice and some traditional written grammar work. The fourth lesson is a reading, while the fifth is a more extended listening. The unit ends with a revision section, and after every three or four units there is a progress check (on the previous three or four units).
The CDs provide invaluable listening and pronunciation practice - pronunciation being one of the most important things in Russian, with its slightly unusal and often unpredictable stress patterns.
There's a nice grammar reference section at the back of the book, and a glossary of vocab (although only in Russian to English, and not English to Russian). Some words brought up in lessons are not listed in the glossary, which is a little annoying, but not too bad.
While the Penguin Russian course is more thorough in terms of grammar, this is an incredible general book covering all three of the four aspects of langauge learning (speaking; listening; reading - not much on writing) for a beginner in Russian. And it does actually enable you to speak properly in Russian. I am up to unit 10 and am using Russian regularly at work to communicate.
I have been using 555 Russian Verbs alongside it, as Take Off sometimes fails to list both aspects (perfective/imperfective) of the verb, and the full conjugations, but this is no criticism of Take Off. It does what it is supposed to do very well.
Highly recommended.
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Great content, shame about the paper quality
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Excellent content, everything is well explained and easy to follow. The audio component is the best I have found in any language course, though it would have been helpful if the book had shown the CD track numbers alongside the listening activities. My only gripe is that the paper quality is very poor and the pages are falling out of the book.
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The perfect introduction
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The combined book and tape set provides a great way to get started and build some understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet and the fundamentals of the Russian language.
The book provides useful general hints on learning a foreign language which will be helpful to anyone new to this sort of thing. The approach taken also helps the material to sink in a bit better. The chapters are all of manageable length with sections that explain the grammar, introduce new language via discussions of Russian culture and expand the concepts with dialogues between characters.
The tapes are great for learning the pronunciation and for practicing and developing your own verbal skills. The system of doing a couple of sections in the book followed by a couple of sections in the tape breaks things up a bit and promotes concentration.
Using the book and tapes together helped greatly with my studies, but I did use other books and tapes to supplement what I was learning.
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Excellent way to start learning Russian!
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Great self-learning pack. I've only just started and in just a few sessions I'm already familiar with the Russian alphabet (+ pronounciations) and able to read Russian words without referring back to the alphabet page. Russian words that sound similar to English words are introduced at the very beginning so that you build up confidence and this motivates you to keep going. The key is not to give up at the beginning because you absolutely do need to learn the alphabet and this will definitely take you a few sessions. What I also like is that in the audio recordings the basic conversations are repeated several times and you're given exercises based on those recordings so you end up becoming familiarized with new words and phrases.
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TAKE OF IN RUSSIAN!
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this item is one of the most useful things i've bought, along with tatu albums (lol)i have successfully started to learn the russian language.
I loved the russian accent and so i decided to give learning the language a go.
i think the combination of a book and cd's, is a very clever idea, this makes it possible to listen to the cd's at any free time, including your sleep!
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