The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners (Penguin Handbooks)

There's not much I can add to what all the other reviewers have already said. I'm an expat living in Russia for a year so far and I'm currently taking classes using a different text (Ben Clark), and I still pull this book out regularly. People of course have many different learning styles and I guess for some genius polyglots, this may not be the best method, but for me the material seems to have a very organic presentation to it. It's certainly not a phrasebook, but the author does tend to present commonly used words and phrases as earlier in the text rather than later. This is a serious book and you can expect to be doing some concentrated studying if you want enjoy its full benefit. I highly recommend this book and it's some of the best money I've spent before coming here.

This is possibly the most helpful self-teaching book I've ever seen. If you stick with it and do all the exercises, you'll be shocked at how quickly and how well you learn the language. Keep in mind that you will still need to either take classes with a live teacher or get an audio teaching course on top of using this book, or your pronunciation will probably be terrible. I also got some vocabulary flashcards (and make my own for the alphabet), but whether or not you'd find those helpful just depends on how you learn best.

The New Penguin Russian Course- is very good for a beginner. It explains the grammar very well and in easy steps.

I just got back from Russia and this book sucks. Russian Language is very difficult, but it has distinct patterns within the grammer that can easily be picked up if the instuction manual shows them. This book is just a book of rules without showing the patterns, which I felt made learning the language more difficult.

I picked up a book in Russia that laid out the language in concise easy lessons and patterns. 2 weeks after I bought it, I was speaking enough russian to get by. It's called " russian in Excercises" by SA Khavronina. You do need to know how to conjugate a verb and you need a russian dictionaray but you will pick up the language very quickly with this book.

I began trying to teach myself Russian (key word: "trying") about 3 years ago, and of all the purely written helps, this is by far the best I've purchased. I very much like its pace: I feel challenged by the exercises, but not so overwhelmed that I want to toss the book out the window (believe me, my neighbors are beginning to wonder about that growing pile of other "Teach Yourself [insert language of your choice here]" in the backyard). "Russian Course" also keeps things interesting by throwing in things the anglophone might be interested in (see title), as well as things one might encounter in the post-Soviet Russia (that pizzeria for which Mikhail Gorbachev once did an advertisement, e.g.).

Not that this book presumes the reader is going to sit in Leeds or Los Angeles and speak Russian to his or her adopted four-year-old or to a new neighbor from Vladivostok. The Russian culture is discussed throughout, with exercise examples featuring Russian customs that appear current to the publication of the book (1996).

Cyrillic print and script are both explained immediately, with the idea that even if one doesn't master writing script right away, recognizing it will be helpful. Grammar is explained in a fairly straightforward manner.

If I could change one thing about the publication, I'd encourage the author to include a short tape or CD, or perhaps a link where pronunciation and the prosody of Russian phrasing could be heard, and where a new student could begin acclimating to them. This suggestion, however, should in no way detract from the book's worth, and a prospective buyer would be well off to purchase this while seeking other avenues to practice pronunciation.