Schaum's Outline of Russian Grammar

I frequently refer back to my copy of Schaum's Outline of Russian Grammar. It is an outstanding source of information. I have owned, borrowed and used a plethora of Russian language study/text books, this one undoubtedly takes the cake! It covers everything that a beginner to an advanced student of Russian could ever need. I have used this book for independent study of Russian and while attending class... It proved to be the best for both! I would highly recommend this book to everyone who has an interest in Russian!

This is my second Russian grammar book. I started out with Teach Yourself Russian Grammar by Daphne West, and while it's a great grammar text for the casual self student, Schaum's is better and will take you farther.

To get the most from this you'll need to really work at it, but I hope to graduate from this to Terence Wade's grammar text and workbook.

This Schaum isn't for the faint of heart, it's for serious students of the language. As such it's excellent. A very comprehensive grammar trainer it will work your grammar skills to a fairly high level. The key of course is to actually do the grammar exercises, something I sometimes lagged behind on.

Great for students or those who work in areas that deal with Russia. I highly recommend it.

I can't rave enough about this book. I've gotten several grammars and do-it-yourself courses, but this book lays it all out on the line in simple, easy to follow language. The accents are marked, exceptions are explained, and rules are given in a format ideal for memorization. Combine that with the vocabulary that can be gleaned from the text, and you have your key to the russian language. I just wish that Professor Levine had writted the vocabulary guide, then the accents would have been marked. I wish I could give it 6 stars!

I'd used quite a few of Schaum's other Outline series titles in various math courses, ranging from statistics to calculus and differential equations, but this is the first one I've tried in a non-quanititative area, and I was pleased to see the quality shines through here also.

This is a great outline and review of Russian grammar. Russian has some major pitfalls for the English language speaker, such as the complex case system, which has six cases just like Latin; three genders, male, female, and neuter; and a verb classification system that is foreign to us. This is the concept of directed vs. non-directed motion.

For example, in Russian there are two words for walking. If you were just strolling aimlessly around, such as walking in a park, you would use one verb. But if you were walking with a specific goal in mind, such as you were heading somewhere and had a specific destination in mind, you'd use the other verb. Many Russian verbs have this dual feature, which means you have to learn two verbs to do what in English you'd do with one verb and an adverb.

The other major way the Russian verbal system differs from English and many other Indo-European languages is that it is built primarily on the concept of aspect rather than tense. This means Russian verbs are more concerned with whether the action was complete or is incomplete, rather than whether the action took place at a certain point in time, as in the familar past, present, and future tenses. In grammar this is known as the perfective-imperfective dimension, "perfective" referring to completed action, and "imperfective" referring to an action that is still going on or hasn't been completed yet. An example in English of the perfect indicative is "I spoke." An example of the imperfect indicative is "I was speaking."

In this context I'm reminded of the example of Japanese, which doesn't have a very detailed tense system either, and in fact lacks the future tense, and has to use the progressive present to express that, if I remember correctly. However, it has instead a complex system of moods or modal verbs, which express such notions as the probability of an action, doubt, the attitude of the speaker toward the subject or person, and so on. This book discusses these complex features of Russian grammar along with many others, and has some of the clearest explanations on these topics that I've seen.

I thought I'd mention one more aspect of Russian grammar, actually phonetics, that I didn't see in the book, since it's very interesting too. This is the phenomenon in Russian of a consonant tending to assimilate the sounds that come before it, as in the sentence, "Ya yedu va gorody," where the "g" sound affects the prononciation of "va" word in front of it. English has just the opposite tendency, as in word, "dogs," where the "s" sounds like a "z" instead of the normal "s" sound because of the affect of the voiced g. Hence, English has forward or anterograde assimilation of consonants, and Russian has the opposite, or regressive assimilation of consonants.

Overall this is another outstanding study outline from Schaum that I can recommend especially to first year Russian students, or anyone needing a quick review of this subject.