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

Russian learners should feel privileged to have this language course readily available to them. I've self-studied various foreign languages using text resources and this far and away blows all the others out the water. This is, as it says, "A Complete Course for Beginners." It's thorough, has a coherent structure and is actually quite enjoyable to read. For example, I always worried about my abilities in Russian due to need to memorize the Cyrillic alphabet. This is the first thing that Mr. Brown addresses and, low and behold, I was able to entertain myself in the first lesson by gradually translating the given word prompts. It really is a fun and productive introductory course for learning the foundations of the Russian language. If you are a beginner, this is THE Russian book to buy. And it's so cheap!

I just wanted to add my own $0.02 to the already great reviews this book has gotten.

If you're like me, you'll have a hard time learning with other methods that primarily use sound/sight recognition and memorization (like the Rosetta Stone).

This book, however, takes a very common sense (and logical, in my opinion) approach to learning Russian. For example, it will not show you a verb conjugation and just expect you to memorize it (like most Russian books/materials seem to) - its approach, instead, is to first show you how to conjugate a variety of verbs. Armed with this knowledge, you then step into useful examples.

As others have recommended on here, I also recommend finding a course or tutor to attend in addition to learning with this book. I took a cheap ($100) non-credit class for a semester at a local university ... it did wonders to - at minimum - have a native speaker to communicate with. The book does do a great job at sounding out difficult pronounciations, but it can only go so far while a native speaker could correct you on the spot with minimal effort. Sure, this book is available online here for $12, but don't underestimate the value of learning a language in an interactive environment (don't even begin to think such a minimal investment is all you need)!

I am a beginner student of Russian and I love this course. It is a wonderful introduction to all the aspect of Russian. My biggest love of this book is that out of all the Russian books I have, it has one of the most wonderfukl overview of cases I have seen. It also does a lot for pronunciation which is sometimes that the beginner always struggles with, it also in this arena weans you from the anglicization after a while which is a tremendous help to becoming fluent in reading and writing the language.

This book is organized in a way to help you steadily learn how to speak russian. It goes into detail on the specifics such as when russian words change. (adjectives, gender, etc) After a few chapters, you will feel that you are starting to learn russian. While some russian language programs seem to leave out important concepts, this book covers the why and how so you know why sentences and words are organized a certain way in russian. After that, it is up to you to learn the vocabulary. But with the information taught in these lessons, you will know how to use the words as opposed to just memorizing them.

I have found the other reviews of this book to be so useful that I have only a brief comment to add. I used the old edition book in grad school in order to learn to read Russian. I could not believe how much progress I was able to make in less than two semesters. By the end of the book, I was able to work through some chapters in books on Soviet history with the help of a dictionay and a verb guide. I felt very indebted to Penguin, especially since languages come slowly for me.

But I must stress what previous reviewers have said: You will need to supplement this book with a CD/tape set, unless you are working with a tutor who speaks Russian, or are interested ONLY in reading. When I later went on to audit Russian classes at my university, I discovered that my pronunciation was WAY OFF. The older edition (I can't speak for the new one) doesn't address big questions like vowel-reduction in unstressed syllables; voiced- and voiceless-consonant pairs; "-ogo" as "-ovo"; and so on. It was tough to have to unlearn my bad habits.

With that said, I can't imagine a clearer, more concise, more user-friendly introduction; it was much better than the first year college text that my courses used. And $60 cheaper! If you use this together with, say, "Instant Immersion-Russian," you can learn a lot of Russian on your own.

A final note from my experience, for what it's worth: The trend these days is to teach languages by conversation, with as little old-fashioned grammar work and repetivie drill as possible. And I'll grant to my professors that I have been able to learn a good amount of French this way. But Russian is a language that really rewards the learner who studies the grammar. And I have found the "boring ole repetitive drill" method to be essential when I try to work on speaking. Russian is so heavily inflected that I can't think through adjective and noun endings while speaking. I simply HAVE TO practice sample sentences over, and over, and over, until I have the forms down, and can substitue the words I want to use.

I speak only modest--perhaps "Intermediate"--Russian. So don't take any of the above as Gospel. But I've found learning Russian to be so much fun. I hope you do, too. Good Luck!