Russian: A Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self-Teaching Guides)

Russian

a self-teaching guide

Learn Russian at your own pace

How do Russian letters differ from English letters? How do you choose the correct form of specific verbs? What are some useful, everyday Russian words? With Russian: A Self-Teaching Guide, you'll discover the answers to these questions and many more about this challenging language.

This thorough primer presents an easy-to-follow, proven method for grasping the basics of Russian, complete with helpful tips on writing and pronouncing Cyrillic characters and building your Russian vocabulary. You get lively dialogues and reading exercises, concise lessons on grammar and usage, notes on Russian culture, and a compact Russian-English glossary. The clearly structured format of Russian makes it fully accessible, providing an easily understood, comprehensive overview for everyone from students to business and leisure travelers to Russian culture mavens.

Like all Self-Teaching Guides, Russian allows you to build gradually on what you have learned--at your own pace. Questions and self-tests reinforce the information in each chapter and allow you to skip ahead or focus on specific areas of concern. Packed with useful, up-to-date information, this clear, concise volume is a valuable learning tool and reference source for anyone who wants to improve his or her understanding of basic Russian.

Customer Reviews:

Tough but good

By L. Niemi - January 26, 2010

I have been studying in Russia (as a total beginner) and this is the only book I took with me. I'll grant you, it does throw you in the deep end a bit, but I find it follows a very logical order and matches what we're learning in class. I do each chapter twice, I muddle through once on my own, and find I'm much better prepared in class. Then, once I've covered it in more detail, I go back over the chapter again. If you are trying to teach yourself, I would recommend getting a companion book that is a little easier, or shows more pictures like another review recommended, but it really is necessary to learn the grammar, despite it being drudgery, and this book will really help you do it.

Not "college textbook" quality

By S. Toon - July 8, 2006

I was looking for a textbook to teach Russian to a student of mine (I am a private teacher) without breaking the bank by buying a more expensive textbook. This was just about the only book available on-hand in bookstores that actually had exercises in it.

I was impressed at first with this book since the spelling rules and hard and soft vowels, etc. are discussed at the very beginning of the book. However, that first impression quickly wore off after using it to teach Russian to my student, who had a familiarity with the alphabet, but nothing beyond that.

My student and I have found that although the discussions of spelling and grammar or word usage were interesting and helpful... we have found a lot of problems: No cursive alphabet; no drawings of clocks, relatives, animals, food, "cheat charts of declensions", etc; not all of the words used in exercises are defined in the book; there are incorrectly spelled words; words are given for the first time in a case... read more