English-Russian, Russian-English Dictionary

When I saw that this dictionary was based on "American English", I was excited to get it. But save your money, or, better yet, use it to buy the Oxford Russian Dictionary. You can easily cope with British spelling (e.g. centre) and you'll find a much more useful dictionary. I find it remarkable that a modern (1994) dictionary purporting to be based on American English completely omits words such as "Internet", "download", "e-mail", to say nothing of all the acronyms associated with computers. Incidentally, you can find them all in the Oxford!

To put it one way, my russian professor, who is from Moldova, said that she would start using this disctionary. It is based off american english, which does make it more helpful. In the front pages gives most all of the rules of conjugating by the case, and the back appendix gives alot of proper nouns in russian. Its a really good dictionary to use, easy (heavy!), and very helpful.

This book is a lot bigger, and better than I had expected it to be. I thought it was a smaller, pocket-ish dictionary. But, it is a good sized, 1100 page book. There are plenty of definitions. This is a high quality book. Worth every dime.

A lot of reviews say that it is not very durable. I think it is absolutely fine if you just take care of it. I hold the spine every time I open the book - and it causes no problems. It is soft, and of comfortable weight. So, I do not think quality is an issue.

There is some brief grammar information at the start, which I like. But remember, a dictionary is for words, not structure.

This book is filled front to back with word definitions. Every page gives something useful to the reader.

One of the best things I like it how it provides accent marks. This, to me, is VERY important when learning new words, as it is to a lot of other people. People dislike the fact that it does not have a pronunciation guide. This really is not at all a problem. As most know, Russian is a phonetic language. The word IS the pronunciation. And, as said, it DOES include accent marks.

Just listen to a Russian native, or tapes, or Pimsleur audio courses to learn pronunciation. A dictionary will not provide that level of understanding anyway.

In all, buy this book. I would get it even if you are British. I also might consider getting the Oxford Russian dictionary (full, not the concise). I don't think it is bad to have two reliable dictionaries at your side.

I might also recommend it to Russians living in the United States. :) This book would make a great gift to those avid in Russian (or a Russian in English).

I can't really understand the other comments for this book.
If you watch a Russian movie and try and lookup the words with this book, you will be missing many of them. Ditto for reading.

The oxford dictionary is big and I used to get lazy and it would be in another room when I was watching a RUssian movie and I would try and use this Katzner dictionary and it was useless. I always had to walk into the other room and get the Oxford dictionary. Same for any reading.

The comments about it being "American English" are really ridiculous. First of all the Oxford dictionary usually has both when both exists and on the rare case where there is a problem, you can look up the word in a normal English dictionary. I mean really, are there native USA educated English speakers writing these reviews that are challenged by British English? Are these same people sitting with a dictionary and close captioned turned on while watching British PBS or movies?

This book is maybe slightly better than the concise Oxford Russian dictionary but is not even close to the full Oxford Russian Dictionary. Unless you want to have a collection of dictionaries, pass on this one and get the big Oxford Russian English dictionary. Unless you are picking berries in a field for a living, your time can't be worth the difference in price.

Also, Oxford really thought through the problems of non native Russian speakers and to the extent that they could without making a dictionary 5 times that size, they did a perfect job.

Awesome dictionary, but I am hoping that Katzner comes up with an updated edition --- this one is still circa 1996. IMO, while still the best dictionary out there, it'd be nice to have an updated version because a lot of the popular lexicon has changed over the past 10 years.

As an aside, this is not the best dictionary for the casual student of Russian because oftentimes if you see a word in print, it is either conjugated or has an ending that is not in the nominative case. That said, you may have to work backwards from there to determine the actual noun/verb. In Katzner's defense, though, a Russian dictionary that gave every case and conjugation would be exhaustive --- yes, they do exist, but they aren't 1000 pages like this one.