The New Oxford Picture Dictionary (English/Russian Edition)

I also used this with my adopted children from Russia (then 6, 9 & 11) and found it extremely useful. It was easy for them to locate a picture they wanted to name, and made communnication much simpler!

I am an English teacher and having eight Russian students with no English vocabulary apart from yes/no, and Russian not one of the languages I know, I used this dictionary to communicate with my Russian students. It worked. The pictures are clear, the reference to the word in Russian and English is easily traceable from the picture and it did work to build vocabulary. As you start getting to grips with Russian (or English) you will definetly need a 'heavier' dictionary. Thus after three months I do not need this book any longer as all the students can speak English but I couldn't have done it without this book. A must buy.

As a department of defense trained russian linguist, i can tell you that this book is useful for english speakers learning russian. Russian pronunciation is fairly straightforward, and should only take a couple of days to learn. (if you don't have a source for listening, you don't have any business trying to learn a language like russian anyhow) After pronunciation is learned, this book is an excellent learning tool, because it is far more useful to learn the language using the cyrillic. This helps both russian language reading skills, and sight retention of foreign words, one of the hardest and most useful things to learn.No, it's not an easy book to learn with, so some might be turned off, but if you're truly committed to working hard at learning russian, than this book will teach valuable skills and vocabulary.

This is a very good book, but the online information failed to show that it is meant for Russians learning English (such as the ESL students mentioned in another review), not for English-speakers learning Russian. So, I was disappointed to get a book with no pronunciation help for the Russian words, when that is what I had expected.

If only they could show a sample page - it would give all the lowdown a prospective purchaser would need. Most of the caveats I saw in the other reviews are true enough, but this is still the best basic ESL resource I've come across (both the monolingual and the English/Russian version). My only negative is that a few items are a bit dated (or maybe that's the book's British roots and it's an item common across the pond but not here). But the thematic approach works great and I'd give this a slight edge over the line of also worthy Bill Bliss illustrated dictionaries.