Customer Reviews

Russian Stage One

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I was worried when I read the comments by the last reviewer about this book, since I knew my russian 101 class would be using it. It's not nearly as bad as he claims. A greater number of examples might be beneficial at times, but i made it through a whole semester with this book without a problem, and without consulting other resources more than a few times.

This textbook is poorly formatted and content is presented in a bizarre and un-useful order. Additionally, while a DVD could be extremely useful for language learning, this one is very poorly made: it often includes several minutes of image with no language content. The book then asks students to watch the DVD with the sound off in order to memorize plot content. While I very much support the use of interactive content in language learning (I teach a university level French course) this book does not approach it in an intelligent way. Why memorize the plot of the film or the images that you see in it when instead you could be spending this valuable time learning grammar and conversation skills? In order to make the film more useful, it should have more audio content, and I am not sure why this did not occur to the textbook writers. It really reads like a low quality high school textbook, and I am embarassed on behalf of the Russian program at my institution for using it.

I tried to learn Russian in college. I was not succesful. The problem was the lack of guidance with the book. THe answers were unavailable, the instruction was minimal and the examples were virtually non existent. The book does teach vocabulary, but vocabulary is useless if one does not know the proper way to use it. Stick with Pimselur.