Russian For Dummies (For Dummies (Language & Literature))

Ok this book is pretty good -- even with the transliteration issue. Anyone with a bit of resourcefulness can use the transliteration to their advantage...just by writing everything into the Cyrillic alphabet. It really helped me be able to read the alphabet, and now it's almost as easy as reading the english alphabet to me. Now, I haven't really been studying russian seriously, as my current interests are spanish and french, but this book does include a lot of information and is not just phrases for a vacation, and I do believe it's a good introduction to the language.

I know and work with Dr. Gettys and I sat in on several of her Russian classes at Lewis University. I can assure anyone who might be wondering why there is no Cyrillic alphabet in the book (except for the brief introduction at the beginning) that the decision to take the Cyrillic alphabet out of the book was made by the publisher, NOT by the authors! Dr. Gettys wasn't happy about the publisher's decision (nor should she have been), but I think that you can still get a very good feel for conversational Russian (from a Russian-born/raised linguistics expert) from this book.

Briefly, I find this book's CD very helpful. The conversations and corresponding scripts in the book assist well in pronunciation. As far as grammar and spelling....I don't want to learn how to spell Russian in transliteration, I want to learn how to spell it in Russian. The authors of this book made a decision to teach nothing in the Cyrillic alphabet, and this makes it confusing those who have already begun to study the language.

For beginners, who may feel they have already learned a lot at the end of this book, I can only imagine it would end up as a disappointment when they come across signs, menus, news articles, etc. in Cyrillic which they are unable to read.

We got this book to supplement some language tapes that we are using to learn conversational Russian. This book is great, because it helps explain rules of the language in very down to earth terms. It gives a lot of helpful tips in speaking and understanding Russian. A great resource.

I should've read more about this before purchase. Fortunately, it was well discounted, because the authors only give you a brief passing introduction to the Cyrillic alphabet (without even naming the letters).

If you went to Russia and got off the plane (or even look at a Russian website) with this as your introduction to the language, you'll be totally unprepared, as something as basic as "Information" will look utterly, well, Russian.

I do see some value in the cultural tips they give, but trying to deal with Russian using a latin alphabet is foolish in my opinion. The alphabet isn't hard to learn (as the authors acknowledge), so why skip out on that? It doesn't make sense.