231 of 233 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How good will you get?, October 27, 2002
This review is from: Russian I, Third Edition (Comprehensive, 30 Lessons) (Audio CD)
I have finished Pimsleur's three levels of Russian. I need not to mention that this program is very well done and of the highest quality. Instead, I would like to answer those who may be wondering, "how good will I get after finishing all three levels of Pimsleur's Russian?"
First of all, be prepared to work hard. It will be fun work, but you will have to concentrate. Some people have to repeat each lesson three times before moving on to the next. I personally had to work through them twice.
At the end of level one, you will know the most basic greetings, you will know how to count to one hundred, and most importantly, you will start getting a good "feel" for the language. Don't expect to be able to converse with anyone at this point.
Level two explores pronouns and gives you more working vocabulary. The future and past tenses are introduced.
Level three explores the complex Russian declensions and gives you a lot more vocabulary.
At the end of the three levels, you will still be at a very basic, survival level. You will have a vocabulary of maybe 300-400 words (this is my estimation so I may be wrong). You will be able to engage in conversations but it won't take very long before you don't know how to say something or you don't understand the other person.
So if this expensive course is so basic, why bother spending so much money on it?
You will pronounce correctly. People will comment on your good, Russian accent. (Ti gavarish bez aktsenta). You will know the most essential words and structures and will will have a good "feel" for the language. You will be in excellent position to learn more.
The next step after that is to take formal lessons with a private teacher, if you can afford it, and study with another textbook. Having worked through all three levels of Pimsleur, you will be able to learn very fast without getting discouraged by the complexity of the Russian language.
I imagine that with other Pimsleur method, more material is presented in the same amount of time. But since Russian is a complex language, a lot of time has to be spent working on single words and how they change according to their role in the sentence.
I feel after having completed all three levels that:
- It was essential to go to the three levels, and not just one or two.
- This is just the beginning, but I have a very solid foundation.
- I wouldn't continue with Pimsleur now, and I understand why they don't have more levels available. I have enough of the basics to continue with more formal training.
This is a very good course - without a doubt the best audio course available - and if you are motivated to keep studying, you will aquire a very solid working knowledge of the Russian language.
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83 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you actually want to SPEAK Russian, this is the one!, December 27, 2002
This review is from: Russian I, Third Edition (Comprehensive, 30 Lessons) (Audio CD)
I don't know about you, but I don't want to learn a language so I can read a newspaper or understand a radio broadcast. I want to communicate with real live people in their own language.
How many people take language courses all through high school and even college only to find when it comes time to actually USE the language, they've "learned" it without the ability to SPEAK it?
This doesn't happen with the Pimsleur method. It forces you to respond, continuously moving forward, teaching you new things while reinforcing concepts learned earlier. This series, along with the Penguin Russian course, will take you very far indeed if you want to learn basic Russian that you can use. The Pimsleur program is far superior to other audio methods in that it's not just repeating incredibly dull phrases over and over again. You interact with the dialogue. You have to THINK and it reinforces things learned earlier at just the right time intervals. A concept is reinforced more often right after learning, but these reminders become less and less frequent as time goes on and you learn new things. But then what you've learned previously becomes part of new concepts and vocabulary that keep getting put before you, reinforcing those concepts even more.
The Key is that you RETAIN the concepts and vocabulary and hence the ability to use the language. You learn correct pronunciation, as the program uses native speakers. You won't be tongue-tied, since you're asked questions in the program and you have to THINK about the answer. You THINK because the question might reference something from three or four tapes ago. You use proper grammar despite yourself because you're not thinking about grammar, you're learning the language the same way you learned as a baby - you're USING it.
Is there a down side? Of course. They're ridiculously expensive (HINT: check out the auctions), but have you priced an evening course at your local university lately? The books and materials cost alone would probably pay for these tapes.
The other down side is that as good as they are, you'll need to use other resources if you want to go past basic usage. The Pimsleur method will teach you the basics, but using it with other materials is easy and those other materials will be much less expensive. The other bonus is that you'll get much more out of them if you use them in conjunction with the Pimsleur program.
If you're serious about learning Russian (or any language, the German Pimsleur improved my German immensely), especially by self study, the Pimsleur program is an incredibly powerful tool.
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pimsleur vs. Rosetta Stone Russian, December 18, 2010
This review is from: Russian I, Third Edition (Comprehensive, 30 Lessons) (Audio CD)
Pimsleur Comprehensive Russian Levels I, II & III vs. Rosetta Stone Russian Levels 1, 2 & 3
I've completed these courses, and thought it would be useful to compare them and offer some general suggestions for learning Russian.
Overview: These courses are a serious attempt to start you on the road to learning Russian. You may be surprised to discover how little overlap there is between Rosetta and Pimsleur in the vocabulary words covered. Even though both require considerable work from the learner, they only scrape the surface of the Russian language. If you want to learn a few phrases to help you on vacation, buy instead a phrase book intended for travelers.
Bottom line: If you can afford only one course, buy Rosetta Stone, but it will likely be an uphill, sometimes discouraging struggle that I suspect many soon give up. I've outlined a more comfortable strategy below:
First: Study "Teach Yourself Beginner's Russian Script", an excellent, inexpensive little book that will ease you into reading and writing Russian Cyrillic script, and also introduce some useful vocabulary.
Second: Study Pimsleur Comprehensive Russian I, II & III.
Third: Study Rosetta Stone 1, 2 & 3.
If you study at least 30 minutes daily and learn at the same pace as me, these first three steps will take six months to a year, by which time you'll have a limited ability to converse on everyday topics, but also a good grounding for beginning the serious work of learning Russian. The more Russian you know, the easier acquiring more knowledge becomes.
Discussion: Language courses cost money to create and market, and the makers want to get their money back, but I wonder if their misleading advertising isn't counterproductive. How many learners give up after the first few lessons when they experience real difficulty with the material? The advertising for Rosetta and Pimsleur misleads buyers about what the courses do and how they do it. These courses are not "easy," and they're only "fun" if your idea of fun is applying yourself to some serious thinking, studying and memorizing. Pimsleur and Rosetta are also careful not to define just how much "Russian" you'll learn; from the advertising you'd think that after a few weeks' study you'd be prattling away in Russian to native speakers! If you start learning Russian as an adult, it's the work of a lifetime--the more you learn, the more you'll realize there remains to learn.
I recommend starting with "Teach Yourself Beginner's Russian Script" because it addresses one of the major shortcomings of both Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur: Neither teaches you to handwrite Russian. Rosetta tries to teach you to print Russian on a Russian keyboard, but printed and written Russian are somewhat different. Also, the writing component of Russian Stone is one of the two most problematic components of the program. (More about that below.)
Pimsleur: The three Pimsleur levels total 90 30-minute audio lessons. Speakers introduce you to Russian vocabulary and phrases, and you are prompted to repeat what you hear and are sometimes asked to generate phrases from what you've already learned. I recommend Pimsleur because it will soon have you speaking quite a lot of everyday Russian with a good accent, even though you won't be able to sustain a conversation.
Today's college language texts are fond of proclaiming their ability to meet the needs of all kinds of learning styles: there are visual learners, auditory learners, digital mechanical learners, oral mechanical learners, and kinesthetic learners. Pimsleur would seem to be woefully old-fashioned, since it addresses only auditory learning. (There are three small booklets with examples of printed Russian, but the examples don't track the audio lessons.) I wrote down each new word as it was introduced, and I counted a vocabulary of approximately 540 words, not counting word variations such as noun and verb endings.
I'm very much a visual and digital mechanical learner, and I soon got frustrated not being able to visualize or spell the phrases I was learning, so I bought two excellent inexpensive books: "Oxford Russian Grammar and Verbs" is a 250-page grammar summary that's helpful in identifying word endings (Russian nouns are declined and verbs are conjugated). I also bought "Oxford Beginner's Russian Dictionary," a 340-pager that contains helpful logical clusters of words and information (Colors; Days, months and dates) as well as standard alphabetized entries with examples of words used in phrases and sentences. For three times the cost, you can buy Kenneth Katzner's more definitive 1,090-page English-Russian, Russian-English dictionary (it's actually American English).
Interlude: After I finished Pimsleur I enrolled in an Elementary Russian course at City College in San Francisco that met for three and a half hours one night a week. The Russian-born instructor and the textbook (Golosa) were excellent. I learned new material not covered by Pimsleur starting with the first lesson, but my Pimsleur background made the course much easier for me than for most of the other students, especially in pronouncing the language. Halfway through the course I began to feel that I was showing off in class and that the instructor was favoring me, so I decided to drop the course and focus on Rosetta Stone. The instructor suggested I switch to the next level class, but I couldn't rearrange my work schedule.
Wakeup Call: Three weeks into the City College course I spent ten days in Moscow (my third visit in five years), and learned just how little Russian Pimsleur had taught me. If I'd relied on my Pimsleur knowledge, I'd have been able to order nothing but Chicken Kiev for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I could ask for a specific book in a bookstore, but most of the time in stores and restaurants I resorted to pointing and miming.
Rosetta Stone: Rosetta is a computer program on CD-ROMs, and has lots of bells and whistles. It obviously cost a fortune to create and produce, and the makers work hard at getting their money back with TV advertising and mall boutiques (which I've never seen do any business). The lessons employ multiple choice pretty colored pictures to guide you to the right answers. There are reading, listening, speaking and writing components to the lessons.
The good and bad news about Rosetta is closely linked to the multiple choice format. It's addictive to be reinforced for getting a right answer, then immediately prompted to answer the next question. The immediate feedback pushes you forward in the lessons. The bad news is that you quickly learn to look for the cues that allow you to choose the right answer, rather than studying the Russian language you see or hear. Thus, if you're asked to choose from among pictures of a man, woman, boy or girl, and you hear the word for man, you don't have to study the rest of the sentence to pick the right answer. In any case, words and phrases are flashed so quickly on the screen that you rarely have a chance to study them. Rosetta teaches you to recognize material, rather than forcing you to produce it.
The two most problematic components are the speaking and writing tasks. Rosetta includes a microphone and voice recognition software, but it doesn't work well. I chose moderate accuracy as my goal, but time and again was frustrated by the shortcomings of the software. The longer the sentence I was asked to produce, the more likely that Rosetta marked me correct, even when I was speaking garbage. But time and again I was graded wrong pronouncing simple words such as "Please" and "Thank you." I learned to cheat the program by pronouncing words and phrases with rising intonation, as if I were asking a question, and by pronouncing the words the way they are spelled rather than the way Russians (and the Rosetta speakers) really speak them.
I challenge any learner with no previous knowledge of Russian to succeed at the writing component of Rosetta. From the earliest lessons of Level One you are prompted to spell words you've seen previously for just seconds when they were flashed on the screen at the end of an exercise. Russian vowels, especially at the end of sentences, don't sound the way they're written. Even with my previous knowledge of Russian, I was often stumped to figure out the right spelling in the writing exercises. By Level Two, I started skipping these exercises. (If you want to use Rosetta to learn to write Russian, my best suggestion is that you buy "5000 Russian Words with all their inflected forms," published by Slavica. Even there you won't find all the word endings you need to write the Rosetta exercises.)
The problem with both Pimsleur and Rosetta is that they vaunt their "immersion" approach without discussing the failings of that approach, which focuses on content regardless of how complicated the grammar is that they suddenly introduce you to. Pimsleur I lesson 5 suddenly introduces you to a sentence in the conditional that is probably the hardest sentence in the entire three-level course. If you were a child who lived in Russia and heard nothing but Russian 24/7, it would make sense to be exposed to Russian without learning any declensions and conjugations in a structured way. These courses feed you Russian phrases without any explanation of why word endings change, and give you no help in figuring out why a word can radically change depending on its role in a sentence. Unless you are an intuitive linguistic genius, you will be utterly bewildered as to why words change so radically between sentences. Rosetta at least shows you the written Russian, even if it's only for a couple of seconds. Pimsleur leaves you stranded; unless you have a photographic memory you'll forget the content you've learned as you move through the lessons, because you have little opportunity to review the material. With both these courses, as soon as you finish the third level, you'll want to start again from the beginning, over and over again.
Good luck learning Russian!
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