Russian For Dummies (For Dummies (Language & Literature))

This book teaches you the basics of Russian in a useful way. You don't have to read straight through either. You can skip to the part you want, like writing letters. I don't think it will teach you Russian on it's own. I suggest investing in the Rosetta Stone Rosetta Stone V3: Russian, Level 1 program and use this book to complement it. The problem is that this book does not use the Cyrillic alphabet. It gives you the basics of the Cyrillic alphabet, but won't teach you to use it. So, you need to learn to read Russian in another book.

Overall: The book is fun and easy to read, it is chock full of great information, and the language CD is useful. However, you will need other assistance in learning Russian, especially for pronunciation.

I have been learning/speaking Russian for 10 years now and I saw the book at the bookstore to see if I could use it to improve things that I missed out from classes I took with Serafima Gettys (one of the co-authors) while she was at Stanford. (I took first year Russian from her).

The book seems to be targeting tourists rather than people who are into learning Russian for good. Does not teach any grammar, no cyrillic and not enough vocabulary. I think the book is mistargeted. For tourists, you need a book that is easy to carry around that have the key sentences or images to point to. Berlitz makes them, and a few other companies. Normally, the dummies series is supposed to help you learn the basics of the language, and here it's teaching no Cyrillic, so the reader will not have the opportunity to learn the language easily, and misses out there, then the lessons are not useful either. They're way too limited and confusing after they get a bit complex in the later chapters. It definitely needs a chapter in cyrillic, and needs some grammar.

I must say that I am not fond of the teaching style in the book. It's hard to read also. It could be fun reading in the toilet if you want though... Russian is the most difficult language among 7 languages I speak, so I highly recommend getting a serious book to teach you.

I like to content and would have used this book but...

When I visited Russia, I had two maps of Moscow one in Cyrillic and one in Latin letters. Which do you think I used? I used the Cyrillic. Not because I could read it, but I could look at the street sign and find out where i was standing. I could not say it but the letters matched and i knew where I was. The latin letter map was impossible for reading the street sign.

You can learn to speak Russian and not read the Cyrillic letters using audio lessons. You can not learn correctly speaking Russian using latin letters. The sounds do not always match the same letter. Until the book uses Cyrillic letters for Russian words, I can not recommend this work.

The author did much hard work of very good quality. Without the Cyrillic it is poor quality book to use for learning Russian.

If you have never studied Russian, and expect to be in country for only a short period as a tourist and want to learn a couple of phrases to get around, this book will do the job admirably. For anyone who wants to really learn the language to become reasonably fluent and conversant in the language, this is not the book for you.

The most obvious problem involves the decision of the authors not to use the Cyrillic alphabet at all, but rather to transliterate everything into the Roman alphabet. This will obviously pose a tremendous problem should the student then actually travel to a Russian speaking country and find everything written in Cyrillic; and worse, the pronunciation guides become pretty confusing and hard to use. The conversations on the CD are vital to gaining real understanding of the pronunciation of the language.

The book is broken down into chapters based on general areas of interest to the tourist, i.e. introductions, food in restaurants, directions, getting around, and so on. These chapters then give you useful phrases, and reasonably short vocabulary to master, all again in Roman alphabet. The categories are well thought out, presented in a format very easy to assimilate, and with a certain amount of humor which makes the medicine go down a little easier.

The authors make clear that the aim of the book is to give you access to some words, phrases, and sentence building tools which will make it possible to communicate the basics in Russian, and not to achieve fluency. That's fine so long as the student knows that going in, although if that is all you want you might be better off with the Pimsleur CD sets (though these are expensive). If you want to achieve greater control over the language, skip this book entirely, and work with a program that immerses you in the Cyrillic alphabet from the start. Using this book in conjunction with a course that works in Cyrillic will only confuse the student.

This book is quite handy...that is if you don't ever plan on reading anything in Russia. I don't understand why there isn't any cyrillic, except for the alphebet (big help!) at the beginning, you would think the being able to read Russian would help. Besides this slight error the book is quite good. A recomendation though would be to buy a cheap russian-english dictionary with this book.