Customer Reviews

Oxford Take Off in Russian: 4 CDs

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is really worth the money. It comes with 5 hours of audio on CD or cassette. The narrator sounds like a Russian Arnold Schwarzenegger (complete with the occasional witticism).
I started learning Russian from Nicholas Brown's Penguin Russian course, which is a very professional book, but alas doesn't come with tapes. Sure, Brown gives good phonetic transcriptions, but you need the actual audio to reassure yourself you're actually saying the right thing! Nothing in language learning is so conspicuous as a good or bad accent, and I'm glad I have this unpretentious Oxford course to help me along.

I have been studying Russian, on my own, for about a year. I have tried Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and many other courses. The other courses, although very good for what they are, seemed to be lacking in one area or another. I also seemed to get bored with the other programs. With this book and CDs, I wanted to keep learning. This course will teach you all the aspects of beginning Russian, at the fastest pace and the cheapest price, which is why I chose it as my favorite Russian learning course.

The good things about this course are its systematic approach to learning the language, and its combination of written and audio material. The one shortcoming is that the course covers quite a bit of ground, and there is not enough reinforcement of previously learned concepts.

Also, be aware that this is mostly a written course, and the material on the CDs is an adjunct. This is _not_ a course you can do in your car.

This is actually a decent little course, but if your budget allows, the Living Language Russian Basic/Intermediate course is better and has an advanced course for further study. But if you're on a tight budget, this is actually pretty good.

I think this would be a great book for someone who has already studied Russian for a while, or someone who is just brushing up their language skills. But the book states it is suitable for a beginner, though I think the learning curve is a little too steep for most. This does a good job of teaching you how to read Cyrillic in the first chapter, but then it goes into some pretty hard to grasp concepts by the third chapter. Granted, Russian isn't easy, but coupled with all the vocabulary, and dialogues this can just be overwhelming for the absolute beginner. The dialogues have quite a few words that aren't in the glossary, and they take different cases than the nominative (which makes it hard to look things up in a dictionary if you're not very familiar with cases). They cover alot of ground in each chapter, which would probably work pretty well for someone already more familiar with the language.

I have to agree with the previous reviewer about the binding. My book started falling apart within only a week of using it.

I use this book/CD set in a beginning conversation class at City College of San Francisco and have found it to be practical, engaging, and quite challenging for the students. We cover the material in detail and I supplement it with many exercises, which are necessary for developing fluency, but the book itself is outstanding, at least when used in a class context. After the first semester, several of my beginning students went to Russia and were able to identify important signs, ask for a few food items in a restaurant, express a few desires and hope to understand some basic responses to their questions. Situations and expressions given in the book allow students to enjoy role-playing while learning essential constructions. I was amazed at how much they managed to accomplish by the end of the year.

For a student studying alone, the program is quite challenging, but worth trying. The booklet, however, fell apart almost immediately. Both my students and I have resorted to photocopying and sometimes enlarging individual pages of the text, as we used them intensively.

The book and audio course is one the best places that a would-be learner of Russian could choose to start. The lessons build quickly from everyday greetings and polite phrases to simple everyday conversations and nothing is introduced in the spoken dialogues that isn't explained right there in the lesson, so there won't be any unpleasant surprises or mysteries of grammar that the student will have to slog onto future lessons to have come clear. By the time that a learner finishes the course they will actually, in addition to having rapidly improving skills in speaking, a pretty good feel for how Russian grammar works- they will of course have much more of the language still to learn, but there won't be anything particularly daunting in the structure of the language that they will meet up with. The courses in this series offer a generous amount of audio- an essential for learning any language and particularly one with unfamiliar combinations of sounds. It must be said that there are other courses that offer much more extensive explanations of pronunciation (check out 'Colloquial Russian') The dialogues themselves are enjoyable and the presenter has a very clear and friendly delivery (and a fun Russian accent). At the end of all of the units except the review units, there is an ongoing story about a Russian family as they make their way around. The review units and self-tests are a particularly valuable feature of the book- students will know exactly where they are and what they have to do next.

While the content is excellent. The binding of the book is very bad and has began to come apart already after approx 4 uses.

This is a good introduction to conversational Russian, it does not bog you down with all the details and intricacies of grammar. It is almost like being taught by a native speaker (most Russians don't know why things are the way they are, but they just are). The book gives you the stepping stones you need to make the jump from learning the language to speaking the language.

Caveat: Get the audio CDs. Some vendors offer the book, but not the CDs. You will need the CDs.

my order was delivered promtly, and condirion of book and cd were in excellant condition.amazon has been very reliable