Customer Reviews

Russian I, Third Edition (Comprehensive, 30 Lessons)

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3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

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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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.

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!

Pimsleur are absolutely the best.

I have brought the complete sets of three volumes for both French and Russian. I recommend them with glowing enthusiasm to many friends and work colleagues. In fact I would say I rave about them - something I seldom do.

I am a fluent speaker of English, German and Japanese. I have taught languages myself and have additionally studied French and Latin in the past. I am something of an amateur linguistic with a life-long love of languages. When I speak German (I studied it at university for a year) poeple's jaws drop because I sound like a native speaker. I love reading Goethe in German and also read technical journal articles on molecular biology, but I really wish I'd discovered Pimsleur earlier. Over the decades I have been exposed to countless different linguistic approaches to learning languages, but none have impressed me as much as that of Pimsleur. I have even ordered CD courses in German from Amazon.de from companies such as Langenscheidt. The language CDs available in German are far superior to the vaste majority of the courses you can get in the English language, but still only Pimsleur teaches language in the same way that I intuitively learned to learn languages on my own over the years. I am so happy that someone has gone out and 'bottled' the secret techniques of good language learners so that people everywhere can discover how much fun learning languages can be.

If you buy cheaper alternatives to Pimsleur you are short changing yourself severely. Costly though you may think they are, enrolling in a course or getting private tuition will cost you as much or probably even more. Being a fluent speaker of a language and being a good teacher are also quite different things, so you may yet end up with teacher who is fluent at a language but poor at teaching it. With Pimsleur you are guaranteed a meticulously structured approach to learning in which you can have complete confidence. Also many of us lead busy lives and may have trouble making it to classes. With Pimsleur CDs and an MP3 player you can learn while you drive, while waiting in long queues or while going around the supermarket. Half an hour here and there soon adds up.

Needless to say my Russian friends are floored when I speak Russian. They say I speak with virtually no accent. With time I think I will expand my knowledge to the point that people think I am a native speaker. I did that with German and I have every reason to believe that I will do it with Russian. I plan to one day read Dostoevsky in Russian. As for the French course I brought that for my partner. I also quickly did as many CDs as I could before our trip to France and again people were pleasantly surprised at the quality of my French.

Lastly my minor list of criticisms:

1. Although the intuitive natural learning techniques of Pimsleur should be the basis of learning languages, I am still a great believer in studying old fashioned grammar (I did Latin!). For every language you can find yourself a ready nice grammatical text. I wish Pimsleur would sell a text book companion to their recordings that makes learning grammar as fun as their recordings.

2. The recorded sound on my Russian CDs was washy. The words sometimes sounded unclear. The French CDs so far have been good, but surely for this price I can't believe this is an issue.

3. Lack of full printed transcripts of all of the recordings. Maybe they can provide this on a CD-ROM if printing it is too expensive.

As a language teacher, I would rate Pimsleur Russian I as an excellent product. Though expensive, it teaches accurate pronunciation, correct intonation (something generally not taught, or not taught well, in many conventional textbooks). Pimsleur's method of repetition and reintroduction is effective and generally successful at keeping one's attention. I agree, however, with a number of criticisms. One of its "strengths" is not introducing too much vocabulary at once. The downside is that there is probably less vocabulary introduced than many could wish. I have not seen Levels II and III, so there may be significant compensation there, but despite Pimsleur's correct observation that core vocabulary can account for the lion's share of our communication, someone wanting to become really proficient in Russian will need much for vocabulary acquisition than Pimsleur provides. Like others, I found Pimsleur works best in conjunction with a good dictionary and Russian grammar. There is no reason why an adult should not take advantage of language-learning helps ordinarily unavailable to a child. I also find that, for visual learners, being able to "see" the Russian words in your mind can be a big help. Although Pimsleur does not advocate this, having such materials makes it much easier for me. It also clarifies some points which would remain obscure unless you learn to read and write the Russian as well (e.g., the different spelling but identical pronunciation for the nominative and genitive singular forms of nouns like "pivo" beer). Also, while learning to speak Russian may be your goal, it seems hardly ideal to be functionally illiterate, so learning to read and write Russian will normally have to be tackled eventually anyway. If begun more or less at the beginning of the Pimsleur course, or a little way into it, it could actually improve your learning even the spoken language (my experience, anyway). In all, Pimsleur Russian is a very good product but best combined with a reasonably good textbook. I think my only real caveat is that you need to take some of the claims for "achieving proficiency" as relative and not confuse proficiency with fluency. Pimsleur is a good beginning, but real mastery of Russian will require much more work. Ideally, it would be nice to see a Pimsleur "Intensive Russian I, II, and III" which tackled some of these weaknesses. It would pay to have some idea about what degree of competence you would realistically like to attain. For getting around as a tourist, I think the program is excellent, but you won't be reading Tolstoy.

I am on lesson 26 of this series, and would have to recommend this to any new student of Russian. Proper Russian pronunciation can only be learned, by listening and repeating. Other audio materials I had worked with go entirely too fast, and are difficult to understand. The Pimsleur language program breaks the words up, making it easier for the student to mimick the native speakers. The new vocabulary is introduced in very manageable amounts (I don't think you ever get more than 8-9 words per unit). The `instructor' continues to test you on these words at various time intervals until the word becomes so well known to you, it becomes natural to use it in a variety of ways.
Like a previous reviewer, some of my Russian coworkers were so impressed with my accent there were responses of `whoa, where did you learn that.'

I have to give this 5 stars, but I have a few reasons: I am not very good mimic, so despite my best efforts occasionally I would pronounce words slightly wrong, Despite Pimsleur's suggestion to not use any other training materials, I found it invaluable to learn the Russian alphabet, and learn the pronunciation rules (this is not as hard as one might think). When I was unsure about a particular word, I would look it up, and use that with the CD's to achieve a more accurate pronunciation. Another criticism is a lack of vocabulary introduced. It would be nice to learn some more basic words. My last criticism is sometimes the grammar concepts don't hit home and keeps you guessing. Despite these very minor criticisms I would have to say that for any potential student starting from scratch this is by far the best way to begin learning this very difficult language.

When I was on lesson 19 of the Pimsleur Russian I, it dawned upon me that I had started to begin THINKING in RUSSIAN. This was quite a surprise for me!!! After having finished level I, it was possible for me to hold a basic conversation in Russian.

I have just finished the last lesson on Russian II and I am about to start with Russian III tomorrow. This stuff is really working for me, PIMSLEUR is truly AMAZING. I am very excited about learning Russian and I am listening to a lesson an average of 3 times before I jump to the next lesson. With my busy schedule and responsibilities it is basically taking me two days to master a lesson, so I had finished LEVEL I after two months.

If you already speak basic Russian, I still recommend you start with Pimsleur Russian I and then continue to II and III. Pimsleur Russian I will SOLID foundations for you to continue to think and speak Russian.

I have also learned how to type using a RUSSIAN keyboard, not a phonetic type, but the real keyboard layout that is actually used in the Russian Federation. You can add the Russian keyboard layout to your Microsoft Windows and also add Russian capability so you can display Russian websites. To learn how to type properly in Russian I highly recommend a software packaged called MAXI TYPE TYPING TUTOR, you can download this off of the internet.

Additionally DECLAN SOFTWARE's READWRITE RUSSIAN software will teach you how to read and write each of the letters in the Cyrillic Alphabet (Russian alphabet), you can also download this from the internet.

Today and after having finished Pimsleur Russian II, and using the software packages described above I am able to chat in RUSSIAN (typing Cyrillic characters) on the internet with Russian people. My Russian friends can't believe it!!! Moreover, during live or telephone conversation they tell me they can barely notice an accent, I owe that to Dr. Pimsleur!

If you have doubts about PIMSLEUR.... and the price... it's understandable... I was also quite sceptic before. Now I am a believer in the PIMSLEUR method. Believe me, Pimsleur is worth every penny!

This course is great, i have followed a distance course and picked up some basic grammar rules and some vocabulary. This course is a good help if you not can listen and speak to natives where you live. You really develope your russian-skills with this. It teaches how to speak and hold a conversation, only thing it lacks in is that it is hard to remember how to prononce something because there is no textbook following it. You can use it everywhere, my tip is to get a mp3-player. It gets 4 stars.

No one in these reviews has touched on the questionable grammar introduced in these tapes... Perhaps these people have not gone on or tried to put their Russian into practice (indeed it is unlikely that someone they don't know will try to correct them on a trip), but I have continually had to 'relearn' certain mistakes in these tapes which were riddled throughout the series. This ranges from things which I have been told are 'unnatural' in conversation to downright ungrammatical. However either should be considered unacceptable, as in an AUDIO course with emphasis on speaking, I would expect emphasis to be on natural, conversational Russian.

Also, many subjects of grammar are 'danced over', and never fully explained grammatically...I realize length of time prohibits this, but I as someone interested in grammar, I would have found it easier for a quick explanation, such as a word is in 'accusitive' form, rather than have them make up some 'layman's' explanation that I have to try to interpret, only to find out ultimately the concept was quite simple.

All in all, this series is a WONDERFUL way to learn language...my attention was always kept and after completing just halfway through the second series, I already feel that I can convey some very simple things with my Russian...

...the only problem is that it's not entirely CORRECT Russian...

The Pimsleur method strives to condition your mind first with the comprehension of words and phrases spoken by native speakers and to allow you to quickly form a response without puzzling over complex grammar rules. Secondly it strives to enable your spoken words to be pronounced correctly with the correct inflection.

The concept is that most conversations in any language consist of only a few hundred words and that most people speak using common phrases or word groupings. If you learn the overall meaning of a phrase, or word grouping, you are able to comprehend what is being said even when the words seem to run together and preemptively anticipate a response. This contributes to a greater fluency of the language and provides an excellent foundation to build on.

If your goal is to be able to converse in Russian this program is for you as long as your expectations are realistic. At the end of the programs I, II and III, if you are diligent, you should have a good foundation of spoken Russian on which to increase your fluency. What is more important is that you will have a good "feel" for the language and chances are you will get compliments on your accent.

Some of the complaints in other reviews are that there is no printed lesson book that comes with the program to teach how to read Cyrillic Russian and that the accent of the male speaker is difficult to understand. If you wish to learn to read Russian as well it would be necessary to supplement this course with another more traditional course that emphasizes reading skills. Pimsleur does not claim to fill this need but rather focuses on being able to converse. As far as the male speaker goes, I have encountered more people on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg who speak with his accent than the female speaker's accent. In addition it is my impression that there is more than one male and more than one female speaker. There seems to be an attempt to familiarize the student with more than one accent and thus increase fluency. This is more of an advantage rather than a weakness.