Customer Reviews

Listen & Learn Russian (Dover's Listen and Learn Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Very difficult for the absolute beginner. The audio cassette does not offer enough repetition for practice nor time to absorb the pronunciation. There is a helpful pronunciation and reading guide in the front of the book.

The CD edition is a well-designed survival course in Russian for travellers. One speaker says a phrase in English and a native Russian speaker says the phrase corresponding to this in Russian with a pause for repetition. It uses the standard one repetition format and provides an excellent choice of vocabulary and phrases, many of which you don't get in other such courses. What I found disappointing, however, was that the quality of the recording was so poor that it was very difficult to pick out what the speakers were saying. I found it was like listening to an old-fashioned short wave broadcast with lots of distortion. The distortion is bad enough to make the CD's unusable for picking up pronunciation details. It's too bad --- it would have been a useful product otherwise.

To start with, this is not a course for beginners. The phrases are too long and too difficult.

Second thing, which is much more important, nobody speaks Russian like that anymore. I'm a native Russian speaker and this is the Russian of the 50s. The course was created in 1956 or 1958 and reviewed in 1980s. The review didn't do much, if anything.

Unless you study history of Russian as a linguist, I do not recommend this book.

I loved it, couldn't have been better. Arrived early in great condition, how could you ask for more?