Teach Yourself Russian Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (Teach Yourself . . . Complete Courses)

I am using this text and its CDs to follow Pimsleur Conversational Russian. I used the 8 CD Pimsleur to jumpstart my vocabulary and pronunciation. Now I am working on my understanding of grammar and expanding my vocabulary using this Teach Yourself Russian.

This is a good introductory text that fits a slower effort than you would make at university. Those of us who have a life --as opposed to those busy defining one-- have to fit language into the interstices. Teach Yourself is good for that. Here is my weekly schedule:

Mon - Read the whole lesson, working out the basic pronunciation of the dialog and conversation bits. I don't even look at the exercises for this.
Tue, Wed, Thu - 1/3 of the exercises each day and listen to the lesson on CD. I listen at least three times and speak along with a lot of it.
Fri - Review two previous lessons. I listen to the two lessons' audio three times and then relax and read through the lessons in the text.
Sat, Sun - I don't make myself do anything but I often read the next week's dialogs or even the whole lesson because I can't wait for Monday.

For those used to cramming languages into their heads at school, this may seem too laid back But you would be surprised how much you learn this way. One other thing I do is always listen to my curiosity. When I start wondering about some particular grammar point, I study it a bit more. The same goes for vocabulary and so forth. Making some progress everyday and feeding your instinctual hunger for detail will get you some fluency in the end.

This course is a little too time-consuming for the casual traveler who wants to just learn some easy basics. I think it's a very good course for someone who has a few months to go through it and is going to spend some time in Russia. It shows the Russian spelling of the words and that is helpful. The course requires a bit of writing in the language and while it's good to learn to write it, it's probably not necessary for the short-time tourist. If you have the time, and enjoy digging into a new language, this is a good course to use. Otherwise, I'd go for "Teach Yourself Instant Russian".

I have used other language books from the Teach Yourself lable and found them to be excelent value. But the Russian book had several flaws that I found really annoying.

Firstly the word lists are often incomplete, both after the dialogues and in the mini dictionary at the end of the book. Secondly the excercises are fairly light which doesn't help with practicing the language. I often need to use a seperate dictionary to find the meanings of words.

Russian grammar is fairly complex with six cases for which all verbs and adjectives need to be inflected. I don't think this book did a very good job of drilling those rules.

The book does have many good points. It is thorough and will reap rewards with hard work. It would make a very good compliment to several other books, especially a grammar book such as Schaum's Russian Grammar.

I bought this book in preparation for a trip to Russia. Years ago I studied Russian in high school and college. As a result, I was able to get into this program fairly easily. However, I would not recommend it to someone with no Russian experience -- it requires that you immediately start reading Russian sentences, and given that the language uses a totally different alphabet, that to me is an unreasonable jump.
My other comment is that the type is quite small and so those unfamiliar Russian letters are a bit more difficult to decipher than they could be.

This book is a great purchase and you should consider buying Beginner's Russian Script to go along with it. I've purchased Russian for Dummies but it doesn't have Russian written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Therefore I think that the Dummies book was a waste. Russian is a difficult language to learn but if you are considering learning it, you should definitely buy this book.