Product Description

A fresh, bright new edition in the best-selling First Thousand Words series. Stephen Cartwright's delightful pictures encourage direct association of the Russian word with the object, ensuring effective learning for language beginners of all ages. Readers can now find out how to pronounce every Russian word in this book, by listening to a native Russian speaker on the Usborne Quicklinks website.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #646958 in Books
• Published on: 1984-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 63 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent book for adoptive parents of Russian children!
This picture book was great because we could look at it together with our Russian son. He helped us pronounce the words in Russian as we taught him the words in English. I highly recommend it for parents going to Russia to adopt. Very comprehensive. Great illustrations. (I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 only because it was lacking accents in the pronunciation guide; hence I didn't know which syllable to accent for best pronunciation. I would recommend that the next edition show which syllable is accented; then it would certainly merit 5 stars!)

two major shortcomings
As a beginning student of Russian I thought this book might be a good vocabulary builder, and for the most part that is true. The illustrations aren't always sufficient to identify the word depicted, but there is an English translation in the back so that's only a minor annoyance. Another minor annoyance is that words are given in either singular or plural form, whereas it would have been nice if both were included.

However, I found two major shortcomings relating to pronunciation. One that has been mentioned in the other reviews is the lack of anything indicating stress, which could easily have been done with either accent marks on the word itself or by capitalizing the accented syllable in the phonetic rendering (PEESma).

The other major shortcoming is that certain vagaries of pronunciation aren't taken into account, such as the devoicing of a consonant at the end of a word (e.g. the word for iron would be more correctly rendered as "ootyook" rather than "ootyoog") and the assimilation of consonants when they occur together ("foodbol" rather than "footbol").

I still would recommend this book but I also recommend getting a good dictionary that shows word stress and making sure you learn the rules of pronunciation and take them into account.

Wonderful Illustrations, Keeps Attention!
My husband is a native Russian speaker and speaks only this language to our 2 yr. old. This book has ended up being our son's FAVORITE book. He loves the illustrations (so do I) and will look at one page for a good 10 minutes. I helps me brush up on my Russian also.
I must add, however, that if you are a BEGINNER to the Russian language this book won't teach you how to correctly pronounce the words. Words are spelled out phoenetically but do not include any clues as to pronunciation.