Product Description

Research into language learning has proved that the easiest and most effective way to learn to speak or write a foreign language is by developing the key skills of listening and comprehension. With almost 5 hours of audio content, reinforced by a clearly laid-out course book, this course gives you a unique approach to language learning.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57211 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Audio CD
• 256 pages

Synopsis
With almost 5 hours of audio content, this course helps you to develop the key skills of listening and comprehension from the very first lesson, so that you learn to understand, speak, read, and write authentic Russian quickly and easily. The course contains: course book and four 75-minute casssettes or 75-minute CDs. There are 14 units and every unit contains: dialogues and activities; pronunciation practice; detailed grammatical help; cultural information and reading practice; test and revision sections; language learning techniques The course is designed specifically to meet the needs of beginner speakers learning Russian on their own. It offers a comprehensive Russian language course for anyone from the absolute beginner to the student who wants to brush up on forgotten language skills. This pack contains the course book with the audio content on CD.

Customer Reviews

Top drawer language book
This book is absolutely superb. It takes you from total beginner level, covering the cyrillic alphabet and basic pronunciation, to around intermediate level. It covers all six grammatical cases in Russian in a nicely paced way, as well as a good amount of vocab.
The best things about the book are the length of the lessons and units and the CDs. There are 14 units, each made up of five lessons. The first two introduce the grammar and vocab, while the third practices it. These first three lessons are based around listening, pronunciation practice and some traditional written grammar work. The fourth lesson is a reading, while the fifth is a more extended listening. The unit ends with a revision section, and after every three or four units there is a progress check (on the previous three or four units).
The CDs provide invaluable listening and pronunciation practice - pronunciation being one of the most important things in Russian, with its slightly unusal and often unpredictable stress patterns.
There's a nice grammar reference section at the back of the book, and a glossary of vocab (although only in Russian to English, and not English to Russian). Some words brought up in lessons are not listed in the glossary, which is a little annoying, but not too bad.
While the Penguin Russian course is more thorough in terms of grammar, this is an incredible general book covering all three of the four aspects of langauge learning (speaking; listening; reading - not much on writing) for a beginner in Russian. And it does actually enable you to speak properly in Russian. I am up to unit 10 and am using Russian regularly at work to communicate.
I have been using 555 Russian Verbs alongside it, as Take Off sometimes fails to list both aspects (perfective/imperfective) of the verb, and the full conjugations, but this is no criticism of Take Off. It does what it is supposed to do very well.
Highly recommended.

Great content, shame about the paper quality
Excellent content, everything is well explained and easy to follow. The audio component is the best I have found in any language course, though it would have been helpful if the book had shown the CD track numbers alongside the listening activities. My only gripe is that the paper quality is very poor and the pages are falling out of the book.

The perfect introduction
The combined book and tape set provides a great way to get started and build some understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet and the fundamentals of the Russian language.
The book provides useful general hints on learning a foreign language which will be helpful to anyone new to this sort of thing. The approach taken also helps the material to sink in a bit better. The chapters are all of manageable length with sections that explain the grammar, introduce new language via discussions of Russian culture and expand the concepts with dialogues between characters.
The tapes are great for learning the pronunciation and for practicing and developing your own verbal skills. The system of doing a couple of sections in the book followed by a couple of sections in the tape breaks things up a bit and promotes concentration.
Using the book and tapes together helped greatly with my studies, but I did use other books and tapes to supplement what I was learning.