Customer Reviews

Russian Complete Course: Basic-Intermediate, Compact Disc Edition (LL(R) Complete Basic Courses)

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

 

 

The first review of this product is incorrectly intended for the "Ultimate" series by Living Language, which has 4 cassettes (or CDs) to accompany the text, and 4 to "learn on the go." The product on this page is the very basic, intro course into Russian and it is quite good. 40 simple, digestable lessons to get you up and running, and to move on to intermediate or other beginner books to reinforce what you learn. Here you get a full review of the Russian alphabet, lots of vocabulary, sentence structure, and listening practice with the tapes. For under $20.00, I found this to be a great deal, and the next Living Language series a good next step. For beginner's, Barron's "Listen and Learn the Fun Way" is comparable, though more expensive with 4 cassettes and lots of pictures. The review also laments that lack of good Russian tapes aside from Penton to learn in the car, has he/she heard of Pimsleur or Instant Immersion? The former is good enough to take a trip to Russia, the latter MUCH better than Penton, the phrases are grouped in more sensible style. That having been said, I give it 5 stars for the value and general solid footing it offers for a beginner learning the language. After this I recommend the Ultimate Beginner-Intermediate, then the Advanced, while simultaneously doing the full Pimsleur 48 CDs (available at most libraries). If you make it this far, go for the full deal at audio-forum, and at this point YOU'LL be teaching Russian!

A great deal of effort went into preparation of the tapes for this product, which is a shame because they have some fundamental flaws that make them very frustrating to use, especially in the car. First of all, there are actually two sets of tapes, one called Learn at Home, which is designed to be used with the text, and another called Learn on the Go, which is designed to be used without the text. They use the same lessons, so you are only getting half your money's worth. The Learn on the Go series rarely gives the student the opportunity to say the phrase in Russian after hearing the English phrase, so it is almost useless for practicing what you have memorized. It is better than some comparable products in that it doesn't have a lot of fluff (music, chatty cultural stuff) that wastes time, but not nearly as good as some. Penton's Learn in Your Car series is by far the best, but unfortunately does not go beyond the beginner level. The other makers of language products should learn from Penton's simple, efficient methods. I taught myself Spanish in the car and am now learning Russian, but I am frustrated by the lack of really good products beyond the beginner level.

When I first bought this item I really did not know what I was in for. I thought I was buying a listen and learn CD course. What you get are CD's, a dictionary, and a course book. I have to admit I was not keen on the idea of the course book and I hated the whole thing after a couple of days, but I stuck with it. Over all I will say that the course is good and you do learn to speak, read, and write Russian. This course teaches you how to pronounce the words really well. I feel this was better for me than courses I have tried for other languages. The only thing I really think could use improvement would be the CD's them selves. There is no English spoken with the words and sentences come one time really fast. You will find your self pausing and replaying a lot. If you want to learn to read and write Russian as well as speak it then this is a good course. If you just want to lean a few phrases and how to ask for things I might try something else.

The Living Language RUSSIAN course is actually a very good one, BUT you will need many other materials, aids, etc... to actually learn Russian, become fluent, converse and read. I am actually using about 15 different products to tackle Russian properly, this is my 8th language and I have just ordered a few books in Russian... classic Russian literature and Pushkin, not translations, but books in Russian Cyrillic.

This package comes with a coursebook, dictionary and a set of 3 CDs.... I completed the 40 lessons in the coursebook, but hardly used the provided dictionary. I personally use the Babylon dictionary and the Langenscheidt.

The lessons are very well organized, grammar is explained in a very clear way, the lessons are fun to do and quite amusing -- at the same time you are actually learning a lot about Russian culture -- and you will definitely need to use the CDs along with the book.

I think the greatest strength of this course is that it ultimately teaches you how to read Russian ... again, the actual native voices on the recordings are great and you go lesson by lesson studying dialogs, particularly in the second half of the course.

Russian is heaps of fun... but you need to work hard at it!

Good luck!

At first glance, it seems too good to be true: A lesson/excercise book with grammar tables, a pocket dictionary, and 3 lesson CDs. What a bargain!
Living Language attempts to teach reading, writing, grammar, and every day conversation all in one convenient package, but does none of these tasks particularly well. For every positive point a reviewer might make about Living Language, I can point to other available products that do it much better. The dictionary? The Langenscheidt Pocket Russian Dictionary is the gold standard, although it's difficult to do worse than Living Language in this area. The lesson book? I'd recommend any of the 5-star Russian grammar texts via Amazon, and most cost a lot less. Conversational Russian on CD? Granted, I haven't heard all of them, but Living Language is near the bottom of the pile, if not actually occupying that position. In this case, Pimsleur is the absolute best of the best; your functional fluency will improve immensely, and natives will compliment your pronunciation--if and when they realize you are actually an American.
Again, it's difficult to recommend this Living Language course to anyone, because it doesn't particularly excel at anything. For a beginner, this will be 6 weeks of foreign language hell. For an advanced-intermediate Russian speaker such as myself, this will be about a week or two of slogging through tedious grammatical review.
Perhaps 10-15 years ago when Russian materials were few and far between, this Living Language course would have been the biggest bang for your buck available. Today however, the availability and quality of alternative products renders this one obsolete.

I bought this product a few months ago.I started using the cds and everything seemed ok at first.I also take classes in russian.My teacher is russian.I'm taking classes for 6 months now.As i was getting better i realized that some of the words where pronounced very wierd.For example the female speaker pronounces the word "shto" which means "what" as "chto" while the male speaker pronounces it regularly as "shto".This is not standard russian accent.I've never heard of any russian saying "chto".So i thaught that this must be some regional accent.I even asked my teacher about this and she laughed.She said that she is not aware of any region in Russia where "shto" is pronounced as "chto".Also some word endings are pronounced wrong.For example a "b" at the end of a word should be pronounced as p,while a b in this course is always a "b" no matter where it is positioned in a word.Has anyone else noticed these?A review of a native speaker of russian would help a lot.

This set has 3 CD's, a Russian coursebook, and a Russian dictionary. The coursebook does have information in it but the book is not put together in a way that aides learning.
The first lesson is 5 pages long. Part A is titled The Letters and Sounds of the Russian Language but tells you that the letters and sounds will be learned in another chapter. Part B gives a list of people's names and Part C lists geographical names.
Lesson 2 is just another list of words and names.
Lesson 3 gives a list of the Cyrillic alphabet and the names of the letters but not the sounds!
The dictionary might be ok but since I don't know Russian, how would I know. The front of this book gives a 4 page pronunciation chart.
I do think the coursebook would be ok for a phrase book.
I don't think the CD's are very useful except the parts that conjugate verbs.
Overall, this is not worth paying full price.