Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5654 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Customer Reviews

Russian Instructor: Why the rave reviews?
I chose to use this book as the textbook for my Russian class because it was cheaper than Golosa or Nachalo. That was a mistake. The book includes all the grammatical information that you need to speak Russian, but a beginning Russian student needs more than just grammar. I don't know the author of this book, but I'm guessing that he doesn't place much importance on teaching. It seems he still adheres to the grammar-translation approach to teaching Russian. The organization of the book is confusing, neither thematic nor grammatical. The exercises are brief, and could have easily been lifted from a Russian textbook that was printed in the 50's or 60's. Frankly, I don't know why this book has gotten such rave reviews, unless it's being compared to not having any book at all. It's a lot cheaper than a real textbook, but there's a reason why it's cheaper. If you want a cheap way to learn Russian, check out the Berlitz Self-Teacher from the library.

Comprehensive, Manageable, Cheap
This is a great book to learn russian from the ground up. Every lesson is comprehensive in its theme and there are exercises at the end of each chapter and solutions in the back. There are also consolidated grammar tables in the appendix for quick lookup and a 1500 word vocabulary. I bought 6 russian language course books on Amazon and this one is by far the best.

EXCELLENT
This book is EXCELLENT in my opinion. When I don't fully grasp grammar points from my russian textbook, I refer to this. It would be nice if it came as a cd course though.