Learn Russian: A Comprehensive Guide to Learning Russian for Beginners, Including Grammar, Short Stories and 2500 Popular Phrases

As a Russian tutor I chose this book to teach my students. It definitely requires a Russian speaker to help with learning since it does not have an audio to follow along. I found a few dialogues that don’t make any sense but I see the author tries to make you practice grammatical structures by giving weird answers. I did find some typos of Russian words of which I made my students be aware of and we corrected them together. So again, it’s better to have a Russian speaker who would help you learning with this book. Besides, the short stories are for upper beginner or even an advanced student. I am still rating this book with 5 stars because it is very convenient for me to use as a teacher. And I hope it will be in stock for many years to come as I recommend it to my students. Thank you!

I bought the Audible course on Russian snd German. Great courses, by the way, but you are missing the written short stories snd just forget trying to learn the Russian alphabet without written materials this book is the companion to their truly excellent Russian course. I’m looking for the German companion, still.

The book was in excellent condition. Thank you for the hand written note. It was delightful and genuine!

I love languages and have been looking forward to learning Russian so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to review this book! It’s a nice resource that guides you step by step in learning Russian and includes grammar, short stories, and phrases. I’ve heard that it’s easier to retain foreign vocabulary when you learn words in context rather than isolation. That’s also been my personal experience which is why I love that THOUSANDS of popular phrases are included! That, along with the short stories in both Russian and English are two of my favorite aspects of this book. I really wish it came with an audio cd since I use a self study approach. Thankfully, I have access to native speakers as language partners who will be able to help me with my pronunciation. If you decide to use this book, definitely connect with some native speakers on a language exchange app etc and I think you will be well on your way to learning this beautiful and unique language!

This text has three parts - a beginner's grammar course, a set of short stories with follow-up questions to test understanding, and a book of common phrases organized by context. The author takes the time to offer important explanations of the sound a composition of Russian as compared to English, which is particularly helpful for native English speakers. The writing is clear enough that you could follow along in this book without a teacher/class, but it does not include audio/video examples so you would want to supplement (movies, shows, youtube, etc). The stories section is particularly helpful; the author paints a pretty optimistic view of reading in Russian (it can be challenging for English speakers to read in Russian in the beginning, but it gets better!), but also offers nicely measured, basic texts that are short enough that a beginning learner could work through them. Overall I would recommend this for personal study in combination with other media so that you also hear/see lots of Russian spoken as you're learning!

Using a brief access by the author, I perused the book quickly. This book is a must for anyone trying to learn Russian. For myself, I need the hard copy to have it readily available.I have already believed that languages and wording reveal cultural characteristics, and to see cultural material added made me very happy, and further piqued my interest.Pronunciations and examples, description of where to put your tongue, using teeth or lips, was very helpful. This book explained that better than my tutor did. There are further pronunciation helps, in parenthesis, for each word, but I need the book to figure that out.Explaining the different verb cases and sample conversations are very helpful. This is one book I intend to earmark and highlight, dog-ear corners and write in.

I really liked how thoroughly this went over the cases and how they're used, which is something that a lot of people have trouble with when learning Russian. I found the text easy to understand and how it covers a wide range of subjects, allowing you to pick up new vocabulary all the way through. Highly recommend!!