Customer Reviews

NTC's Dictionary of Russian Cognates Thematically Organized

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NTC's Dictionary of Russian Cognates Thematically Organized (2000), the most recent cognate compendium by Rose Nash, is at once the most complete and most useful work in its field.

Advertised as a vocabulary builder, the book has special relevance for English-Russian translators. The number of cognates is extraordinary 264 double-columed pages and the organization by themes is very easy to follow through an alphabetical listing of topics. Entries are alphabetically listed, in English, under subtopics, so items can be found quickly.

Nash's Introduction is excellent. The student-oriented orthographic and phonologic description of the Cyrillic alphabet is lucid and thorough. The sections on the nature of cognates and their use in translation are applicable to any language context.

The book is available only in paerback. This keeps the cost down but magnifies wear and tear on books subject to a lot of handling.

Dr. Eugene V. Mohr

I am one of those people alluded to by another reviewer of this book, someone who lives amidst a large number of Russian speakers. My intention in buying the dictionary was not to help me learn Russian, but to aid in building the ENGLISH vocabulary of a Ukrainian man I tutor. The book is so impeccably organized (by theme groups subdivided by topics) that it has given my student and me a good foothold on the hardest part of mastering a language, namely getting to the point where you can express abstract thinking.

With such topics as "Knowledge, Faith and the Paranormal," and "The Inner Self," it is possible to start from a ready-made vocabulary of cognates expressing the abstract and combine them with the vocabulary of concrete fact. We are thus arriving at the articulation of ideas that are part of adult thought but are nearly impossible to express in a new language or explain to someone new to English, due to a certain built-in circularity in the definitions of these concepts.

In an immersion theory of teaching ESL, of course, it is not considered advisable to converse in anything but English. This allows me not to break with that doctrine, with the added bonus that I am now beginning to recognize words in Russian. If this doesn't stop soon, I may end up as a student of my student.

While I understand the fact that the point of this book is to quickly bolster a student's ability to speak and understand Russian vis-a-vis applying knowledge of English to Russian cognates, many of the choices listed in this book fall into the following categories:

1) False cognates. There are numerous cases where an anglicised or latinate word is rendered into Russian incorrectly. This is confusing for Russians listening to the speaker, who do not understand exactly what the anglophone is trying to say.
2) For many of these words, recent borrowings from English exist, but the new word is generally not immediately as usable as the native Russian word. A good choice to show a Russian your wordpower, but not " -".

Overall, this book was still helpful and did a great job of categorizing words in a logical and easily-readable manner.

4/5

This book is a fantastic way to build your Russian language vocabulary. The author's definition of "cognate" stretches enough to include what general texts disregard, and includes cognates for words that are in use in the English language, but aren't English. It's thematic organization makes it easy to study/self-quiz (rather like those grade-school vocabulary tests we all had to take.) The organization also makes it easy to understand the context of a word, which a bi-lingual dictionary doesn't always do. Because most topics could come up in everyday language (depending on how much you like to talk) it is a helpful resource for travelers, or people who live in towns that have sizeable Russian communities.