good for written Russian, but needs an ASR
For an excursion into written Russian, this book is well done. The use of Russian throughout the text has been maximised, to push you towards as much of an immersion in it as possible.
The grammar is developed considerably over the duration of the text.
For spoken Russian, you need to turn to the accompanying Student Activities Manual with audio and video recordings. Plus, the authors offer a website with tests you can take and more recordings. Sadly, there seems no indication of the use of an Automatic Speech Recogniser for Russian, for the student to more fully test her pronunciation. For those of you who have studied the teaching of any language, this book and its companion recordings and website can be an unfortunate anachronism in this respect.
2008-02-29
