The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners (Penguin Handbooks)

The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners (Penguin Handbooks) | Nicholas J. Brown | Great Course for the Self-Taught Russian Student

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The New Penguin Ru...

	The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners (Penguin Handbooks) Nicholas J. Brown Penguin (Non-Classics), 1996 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 59 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This is the book.

Forty years ago I studied Russian in college and used the unwieldy British- and Harvard-oriented texts of that time. After a few years I forgot it all. I recently decided to relearn the langauage and bought all the good texts I could find. This is the one I keep going back to. It's straightforward, easy to use, and well organized. It's made virtually every commuter rail trip with me in the past year while I work my way through at my own pace. I've amply annotated it and filled it with 3x5 post-it notes for the exercises. I still use it for the easy-to-find tables in the back. And throughout the appendices, vocabulary lists, and glossaries, lesson numbers are noted for most words and concepts. It's short on subordinating and adverbial conjunctions. The letter-writing section is short and a bit formal for casual writing. It gives good conversational information but it would be better with accompanying tapes. This is the book I took to Russia with me.

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Great Course for the Self-Taught Russian Student

I picked up this book at the library on a whim, and was so quickly drawn in that I decided to purchase the living language course with CDs to be able to continue learning Russian on my own when the book was due. I found, though, that while the CDs are helpful for pronunciation and aural comprehension, the Penguin course has been most helpful overall. I plan to purchase it now, and highly recommend it for any beginning (self-taught) Russian student.

It works,

Unlike alot of the russian books, This one does not assume you already have a basic foundation in Russian. If you're just starting out and don't even know the cyrillic alphabet yet, this book will help you alot, at least it helped me.

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good book, a little different than most

This is a good textbook which thoroughly covers basic Russian grammar. My only complaints are that noun declensions are listed in a different order than I've seen in every other Russian textbook: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional, and that the verbs of motion are listed with the multidirectional form first. This is not that big a deal, except that it's cumbersome if you previously memorized declensions and conjugations in a diffferent order.

Good Book for Beginers

This book is good for those who want to learn Russian on their own. It starts out with the basic material, such as the alphabet and numbers, that some books/software assume you already know. The book works best when you combine it with a software program so that you can hear the words too.

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