Oxford Russian Dictionary

It took nearly a month to receive the item, but they were very good at responding to my inquiries.

I would like to clarify some points mentioned below by other reviewers. First of all it is true that the Russian pronunciation is not given, but neither is it given in any other English-Russian dictionary that I know of, or, for that matter, in any Russian dictionary. This is because in Russian each sound is pronounced like it is written. So basically you have to learn the Russian alphabet. So this is not for real beginners. One can't blame the dictionary for this because it was created as an aid, not a teaching course. Still there are some grammatical rules you'll have to learn if you want to pronounce the Russian words correctly, not too difficult rules in my opinion. Basically it all comes down to the accent (very simple stuff). I will resist giving you examples and instead I will give you the websites where you can learn for yourself. If one wants to learn Russian from scratch (or almost from scratch) I recommend that he visits these two websites. They are free and they should be useful if the person wants to know if he really wants to pursue learning Russian before spending money on books, it will help him decide whether he is sure that he is serious about this.

To recite the Russian alphabet: http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Track/7635/alphabet.html

Russian grammar and to learn how the letters of the Russian alphabet are pronounced in context:
http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/index.html

After studying the above websites I would recommend, for the beginner, to buy books like "Russian Course, The New Penguin : A Complete Course for Beginners", or "Russian Stories (Russkie Rasskazy): A Dual-Language Book" if he is more advanced.

Like with any language the real difficulty is memorizing and learning the actual words, not the grammar.
But a person can spend his entire life as a native English-speaker and still find some words that are outside of frequent usage that he doesn't know how to pronounce; this will never happen with languages like Russian or Greek. Thus the grammar is a bit more difficult to learn in those languages but it serves you for life.

I agree that this dictionary is insufficient if you're reading heavy literature. But if you know enough Russian to read Dostoyevsky then you should know enough Russian to be able to visit an online Russian bookstore (like http://www.ozon.ru/ or http://www.bolero.ru/index.html or http://www.kniga.com/books/default.asp?) and find a good multi-volume Russian dictionary for yourself.

Oh woes me! I lost my Penguin dictionary and had to shell out [price] for this sub-par and seriously inferior dictionary. Compared with Penguin...well there in no comparison: This one seriously lacks in idiomatic expressions, slang, synonyms and sentence examples for their words. I need to get another Pengiun dictionary fast!

Why are good Russian materials so hard to find? If you're a Russian guru, make some money and alleviate this problem!!!

This is a big thick heavy volume printed in nice large
font on fine white paper, and it is mostly useless.
I am a native Russian speaker and pretty good in English,
having studied it for good quarter a century. I was looking
for a decent dictionary to look up more difficult words,
and I was specifically looking for one volume two-way
Russian-English dictionary for ease of use.
This dictionary turned out to be a waste of money. It only
has the most primitive words both in Russian and English
sections, no slang (and I am talking standard slang, not
street speak), definitions are poor, very few synonyms.
It may be good for beginners but as a reference dictionary
I would not recommend it to anybody.

As a Russian translator in the U.S. military, I have used this edition as well as earlier ones in my work, and I have to say that this is an improvement upon the others, which were already very good. A question for the reviewer who wrote that the back cover contained spelling mistakes in Russian: Where are they? I know the spelling system of the language quite well, and reading the back cover several times, I could find neither spelling mistakes nor incorrect case endings. As for word choice in Russian, it could be that native speakers would have phrased some things differently (as a non-native speaker, it's hard for me to judge), but the Russian text is certainly grammatically correct and the meaning is clearly conveyed.