  Not very useful for English students of Russian language
The Oxford Picture Dictionary for Russian seems geared toward Russian students of English. It would be more useful for this if it included International Phonetic Alphabet beside the English words on the picture pages. Instead, non-IPA pronunciation guides are buried in an index. For the student of Russian, it's almost useless. Russian is fairly phonetic--if you know where the accent falls. Unfortunately, accent marks are completely absent, and the two dots of letter are never shown, confusing it with . (While standard written Russian omits these marks, pedagogical texts should include them.) A student who learned the word for "bill, receipt" from this book would mispronounce as , eliciting great confusion and then laughter from his Russian friends. Also, when the book gives a plural noun, you can't always predict the singular form. For other nouns irregular plural forms aren't given. Noun gender is never given and sometimes can't be predicted. The only way to make this book useful for correctly acquiring Russian vocabulary is to look up all 2400+ words, a daunting task! 1999-11-02
Excellent for U.S. people adopting Russian children!
We got this book to assist us with teaching our soon to be adopted 14 year old daughter English. The pictures are all coded with a number, and at the base of each page, there is a Russian and English word for what the numbered item is, in the picture. The dictionary shows various situations as one large picture: For example, each room of the house, and each item in each room is labeled. Also, school rooms, bus stops, all kinds of foods and "things". Airports, relationships (family tree), body parts, clothes, feelings, situations and so much! This is an awesome tool to use in communicating with someone of any age who speaks Russian and needs to communicate to you in English. (Or vice versa). I will also know by our daughter pointing to a picture and then the number associated with it, that we are talking about the exact same thing. She can read the Russian word, and I will tell her (pronounce) the English word. So, we are sure to be talking about the same exact thing. Paperback and easy to carry around. Very clever! 1999-05-23
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