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Teach Yourself Russian Complete Course | 
 enlarge | Author: Daphne West
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $6.00
You Save: $8.95 (60%)
New (1) Used (8) from $3.69
Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 2441683
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3 Sub
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0071395121
Dewey Decimal Number: 491.782421
EAN: 9780071395120
ASIN: 0071395121
Publication Date: August 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Teach Yourself Russian Complete Course is an easy-to-use program for learning on your own, or can be used as supplemental material for your classes. These new editions have been thoroughly revised and updated to include the engaging dialogues and helpful exercises you have come to expect from the Teach Yourself series.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Great language learning course November 16, 2008
I love this book, it's very neatly organised, with great excersises. You'll learn everything necessary for daily survival (asking for directions, purchasing items, understanding signs and commercials), along with expressing abstract ideas and writing letters.
 CD is okay, book can be thrown away November 15, 2008
The cd is okay but the book is horrible if you are someone who has no experience with the Russian language.
Initially the book teaches you the Russian alphabet and then right after that it starts translating English words and phrases into Russian words (with no information as to how to pronounce the words).
A Good Introduction August 23, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I am using this text and its CDs to follow Pimsleur Conversational Russian. I used the 8 CD Pimsleur to jumpstart my vocabulary and pronunciation. Now I am working on my understanding of grammar and expanding my vocabulary using this Teach Yourself Russian.
This is a good introductory text that fits a slower effort than you would make at university. Those of us who have a life --as opposed to those busy defining one-- have to fit language into the interstices. Teach Yourself is good for that. Here is my weekly schedule:
Mon - Read the whole lesson, working out the basic pronunciation of the dialog and conversation bits. I don't even look at the exercises for this.
Tue, Wed, Thu - 1/3 of the exercises each day and listen to the lesson on CD. I listen at least three times and speak along with a lot of it.
Fri - Review two previous lessons. I listen to the two lessons' audio three times and then relax and read through the lessons in the text.
Sat, Sun - I don't make myself do anything but I often read the next week's dialogs or even the whole lesson because I can't wait for Monday.
For those used to cramming languages into their heads at school, this may seem too laid back But you would be surprised how much you learn this way. One other thing I do is always listen to my curiosity. When I start wondering about some particular grammar point, I study it a bit more. The same goes for vocabulary and so forth. Making some progress everyday and feeding your instinctual hunger for detail will get you some fluency in the end.
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[later] I'm on Lesson 13 now and I thought I'd add something about the hard part. Once you get used to Russian, you discover that the only really hard thing is all the noun endings. Every one of the six cases has different ending for nouns according to gender, of which there are three, each of which has three to four subgroups. Do the math. Nightmare.
Here's how I keep from letting it stop me. I make sure I learn everything else: the exercises, the dialogs, the reading. I understand those. Then -- when I feel like it -- I study an ending. I make up an exercise for it and practice using it with all those nouns. Then I go back to the lessons. This way, I will get there -- even if I get there slowly. Just a thought.
Russian language course July 6, 2008
This course is a little too time-consuming for the casual traveler who wants to just learn some easy basics. I think it's a very good course for someone who has a few months to go through it and is going to spend some time in Russia. It shows the Russian spelling of the words and that is helpful. The course requires a bit of writing in the language and while it's good to learn to write it, it's probably not necessary for the short-time tourist. If you have the time, and enjoy digging into a new language, this is a good course to use. Otherwise, I'd go for "Teach Yourself Instant Russian".
 Average compared to other 'Teach Yourself' language books June 21, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have used other language books from the Teach Yourself lable and found them to be excelent value. But the Russian book had several flaws that I found really annoying.
Firstly the word lists are often incomplete, both after the dialogues and in the mini dictionary at the end of the book. Secondly the excercises are fairly light which doesn't help with practicing the language. I often need to use a seperate dictionary to find the meanings of words.
Russian grammar is fairly complex with six cases for which all verbs and adjectives need to be inflected. I don't think this book did a very good job of drilling those rules.
The book does have many good points. It is thorough and will reap rewards with hard work. It would make a very good compliment to several other books, especially a grammar book such as Schaum's Russian Grammar.
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