62 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
EXCELLENT Reference !!!!, May 14, 1999
By A Customer
I had used three other Russian/English dictionarys but this has it all. It even has some 4 letter words you might find offensive. My wife is Russian and our communication has improved because of this fantastic dictionary. The meanings of words have been well researched and are translated exactly. I would recommend this reference for anyone learning Russian or for the Russian needing an English word equivilant.
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33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Helping you decide if this is the best for you., June 13, 2005
I would like to clarify some points mentioned below by other reviewers. First of all it is true that the Russian pronunciation is not given, but neither is it given in any other English-Russian dictionary that I know of, or, for that matter, in any Russian dictionary. This is because in Russian each sound is pronounced like it is written. So basically you have to learn the Russian alphabet. So this is not for real beginners. One can't blame the dictionary for this because it was created as an aid, not a teaching course. Still there are some grammatical rules you'll have to learn if you want to pronounce the Russian words correctly, not too difficult rules in my opinion. Basically it all comes down to the accent (very simple stuff). I will resist giving you examples and instead I will give you the websites where you can learn for yourself. If one wants to learn Russian from scratch (or almost from scratch) I recommend that he visits these two websites. They are free and they should be useful if the person wants to know if he really wants to pursue learning Russian before spending money on books, it will help him decide whether he is sure that he is serious about this.
To recite the Russian alphabet: http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Track/7635/alphabet.html
Russian grammar and to learn how the letters of the Russian alphabet are pronounced in context:
http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/index.html
After studying the above websites I would recommend, for the beginner, to buy books like "Russian Course, The New Penguin : A Complete Course for Beginners", or "Russian Stories (Russkie Rasskazy): A Dual-Language Book" if he is more advanced.
Like with any language the real difficulty is memorizing and learning the actual words, not the grammar.
But a person can spend his entire life as a native English-speaker and still find some words that are outside of frequent usage that he doesn't know how to pronounce; this will never happen with languages like Russian or Greek. Thus the grammar is a bit more difficult to learn in those languages but it serves you for life.
I agree that this dictionary is insufficient if you're reading heavy literature. But if you know enough Russian to read Dostoyevsky then you should know enough Russian to be able to visit an online Russian bookstore (like http://www.ozon.ru/ or http://www.bolero.ru/index.html or http://www.kniga.com/books/default.asp?) and find a good multi-volume Russian dictionary for yourself.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
best russian english dictionary, May 20, 2006
I have many Russian English dictionaries, including some you can only get in Russia and some written entirely in Russian and this is by far the most complete and helpful dictionary I have. I use it almost exclusively.
I must confess though that I don't use the English-> Russian part very often. I'm usually translating from Russian. I usally learn new words from movies and books and am not looking up so many words just from English. In correspondence I use it and it always has what I need.
You can look up some of the most clever dialogue in films with this dictionary.
Of course, a dictionary is not a grammar book and there are stylistic things about Russian that create ennumerable combinations of useage that a dictionary cannot address.
There are some complaints I have but they are not addressed by any other dictionaries I have seen. For example, the ppp is troublesome because it's hard get the stress right and they try to put all the most common ones in there but they miss them sometimes but so do all the other dictionaries. In that case you have to guess from grammar rules or consult the real dictionaries for such that are written totally in Russian.
The only places it fails me are in situations where you need to go to a Russian dictionary that is written entirely in Russian. There are a few classics used there. It would not be possible in general to create such a dictionary for English speakers because the assumptions about language familiarity and grammar could not be met by any but fairly advanced users and in that case, why not just use the actual dictionary Russian speakers use?
If you want to buy one dictionary, get this one. Don't get the concise version though, spend the money and get the full version. It's worth it!
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