Schaum's Outline of Russian Grammar

This book covers a lot of grammar, but it isn't organized progressively. Each lesson has topics from other lessons, so you'll often have to skip around. Regardless, pretty much anything you'd need to know is included in this book. If you don't know how to express dates for instance, you can skip to that section and there are detailed explanations and examples. I wish there were more exercises, but this is really more of a reference book than a drill book. There's no glossary, but you'll find a lot of Russian vocabulary here, so it's also good to have a dictionary when you use this book. Overall, this is an extensive, thorough grammar book, but it's really not a great introduction to Russian. Buy this after you've learned the basics.

As a second-year Russian student I purchased this book based on the 5-star ratings reported here.

At that time I was looking for a book that would teach me Russian grammar, and I was quite disappointed during the first week of reading. It doesn't explain the grammar rules in a simplified manner, and uses a linguistic vocabulary that seemed foreign to me at first.

For example (p. 182), "Adjectival nouns, like regular adjectives, are in the genitive plural (due to an implicit masculine head noun) or nominative plural (with implicit feminine head noun)".

And (p. 183), "Numbers decline exactly like feminine nouns of the third declension"

Of course this does make sense, but it certainly isn't suited to a beginner.

I gave this book 4 stars because as an outline and reference book it does the job really well. I don't pick it up as often as some of my other Russian books, such as the New Penguin course or Farmer's Teach Yourself Russian, but it's handy as a grammar reference.

Organisation of chapters seems pretty logical, and the exercises at the end of each section are directly related to the material that was discussed.

A significant amount of the Russian (Cyrillic) text is written in lower-case (italics) ...just so you know! Some people (like me) can read upper-case with ease, but become frustrated with lower-case.

As the topic of this review states, it's a great book, just be aware of what you're buying.

I've always used Schaum's Outline Series, from Math to computer, and now the Russian language. It's hard to find a comprehensive reference book that will explain Russian language grammar precisely, let alone in an easy and comprehensible way. It's also provides exercises. A highly helpful and desireable book.

Schaum's Outline of Russian Grammar is good reference for a 1st year Course in Russian. The subject is explained clearly and the contents are well indexed. Given the extensiveness of the subject further studyt would require more specialized texts.

I recently bought this book along with the New Penguin Russian Course, and the two complement each other very well. The way the Schaum's Outline of Russian Grammar is set up, you could use it with just about any type of Russian lessons, but I think it would be particularly helpful with conversation heavy systems like Pimsleur or Immersion method. The concepts are presented matter of fact and the exercises are very useful to use as self-drill. The overall layout, from a "this is how we'll break down the grammar rules" perspective is also very easy to understand, without skimping on the complexity of certain issues like verb aspect, or uses of the conditional mood, or irregular case endings. It even has stress marks (inexplicably omitted from Schaum's Vocabulary Outline) which are certainly the most important thing after learning the alphabet in terms of learning Russian pronunciation and intonation. Also, there are many explanation of shades of meaning implied by slight changes in grammatical usage. This book has been so helpful and useful that I just can't imagine a serious Russian student, particulary a do-it-yourselfer, not having it on hand.