Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18149 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Cards

Customer Reviews

Great learning tool and an absolute bargain.
This is a set of flash cards that roughly corresponds to the 1000 most commonly used words in the Russian language. They're great. They're the perfect size, small enough to carry a bunch comfortably in your pocket, but not so small that they're difficult to manipulate in your hand.

My suggestion would be to use these in conjunction with the Russian Learners Dictionary by Nicholas J. Brown. It lists 10,000 Russian words in order of frequency of use. Use the dictionary, sort through the cards and pick out the first 100, once you've learned those, move on to the next hundred. Once you run out of cards, you'll have to start making your own, but vis-ed makes blank cards too.

From Vis-Ed With Love
Part of me is actually dreading the day I move beyond my Russian textbook for beginners. That's because the more Russian I learn, the less likely I'll be to find the new vocab words in this excellent set of flashcards.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the box contains 1,000 cards, but many cards have multiple words or word combinations, so the total vocabulary contained therein is about 3,000 words. The cards are boxed in alphabetical order, and they're also numbered. Many of the cards identify the part of speech for the given word or words, and for Russian prepositions, the governing case(s) is/are also listed (infinitely helpful). Verbs are presented in aspectual pairs and are marked as either First Conjugation or Second Conjugation. Cards for irregular verbs show the conjugated forms for imperfective present/perfective future (first person singular, second person singular and third person plural) and past tenses as necessary.

In the nine months since I bought them, these cards have been invaluable. My textbook has a review after every five lessons, so I coordinate each new batch of flashcards with the unfamiliar words from the five lessons preceding each review. After 25 lessons, I can think of only a dozen or so words from the textbook that are not included in the set of flashcards. In addition, the cards fit perfectly in a pouch in my backpack, allowing me to brush up on my Russian anywhere I go. Vis-Ed also offers two other sets of Russian flashcards. If they're anything like the vocab cards, they're sure to be beneficial, because the vocab cards have been far and away my most effective Russian study aid. They have paid for themselves many times over. Now if I could just get Vis-Ed to make a set for intermediate/advanced students!

A Good Brush-Up of Russian Vocabulary
The vocabulary terms used here are basic ones, and there appear to be few if any technical terms. Although there are a thousand vocabulary words, many of them have multiple usages per card. For example, card 292 is kak (how, as), but also includes a listing of: kak budto (as if), kak-nibudt (somehow, sometime), and kak-tolko (as soon as).

A booklet is included with the set of one thousand vocabulary cards. This booklet includes hints for usage of the cards for maximum benefit, as well as a listing of all thousand cards. This listing makes it easy to keep track of lost or missing cards, or for one person to quiz another directly from the list. One can, of course, also make an enlarged photocopy of this list and to check off the words that one does not know.

The set of cards is very portable. All thousand cards fit into a 21 cm by 9.5 cm by 4 cm box. Each vocabulary card is 9 cm by 4 cm in size.