Product Description

This dictionary contains 10,000 Russian words in order of importance starting with the most common and finishing with words that occur about 8 times in a million. All the items have English translations, many have examples of usage and the entries include information on stress and grammatical irregularities. There is also a complete alphabetical index to the words in the list. A learner who knows all or most of these 10,000 words can be regarded as competent in Russian for all normal purposes. The list takes you from a beginner's core vocabulary through to postgraduate level.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172821 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-27
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 440 pages

Synopsis
This dictionary contains 10,000 Russian words in order of importance, starting with the most common and finishing with words that occur about 8 times in a million. All the terms have English translations, many have examples of usage, and the entries include information on stress and grammatical irregularities. There is also a complete alphabetical index to the words in the list. A learner who knows all or most of these 10,000 words can be regarded as competent in Russian for all normal purposes. The list takes the user from a beginner's core vocabulary through to postgraduate level.

Customer Reviews

Excellent
This is by far and away my favourite Russian study aid. I used this throughout my year in Russia and my honours year. Every day I would try and learn 20 new words as they appeared in frequency order- and it was amazing when reading a Russian magazine or newspaper - they literally sprang out the page the day you learnt them.

I would say that this book is ESSENTIAL if you are to study Russian even remotely seriously. It is invaluable.

Recommended for all serious students
This book is both fascinating and a boon for any serious student of the language.

Some of the words in the earliest sections of the book will be surprising, and some of those that don't appear will also surprise you.

As a learning tool, I can say from personal experience and from the experience of friends, thoroughly learning the high frequency words and working your way through will increase your reading fluency in leaps and bounds.

As a fascinating linguistic study it will be of interest to any Russian learners who wonder how things such as communism, glasnost, perestroika etc have affected the language.

It isn't a book for beginners, it's a bit heavy for anyone just starting out (literally as well as metaphorically ;)) as well as not being especially cheap (though it's good value). This isn't a dictionary in the "I-want-to-know-the-word-for-bread-now" sense, and anyone expecting that would be disappointed. But for any student who wants a structure to vocab learning, or wants to improve reading fluency, etc, it is a godsend and well worth the money.

A tool that should be replicated for other languages
Learning Russian is a difficult task due to the unfamiliarity of vocabulary compared with most European languages. I have been using this book since my first year of university and have found it to be the most useful weapon for tackling the language. Work through the book, restesting yourself regularly and you should be able to build up a formidable vocabulary with a bit of effort. Exemplary sentences are given for the first 600 words; it's a shame that this couldn't be done for all 10,000 but would make the book a lot larger. Language learning would be a lot simpler if more works like this could be produced.