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

This title doesn't try to be all things. It has a specific purpose and that's to serve as a pocket guide to conversational Russian--in a hurry.

The book covers most situations that a casual visitor can expect to encounter.

Learning Cyrillic requires another book. Wouldn't it be unrealistic to learn the English alphabet from an English phrase book meant for non-English visitors?

Incidentally, I've found that reading Cyrillic isn't as difficult as it seems. Many words are phonetically transliterated, e.g., taxi is still taxi in Russian except that it uses the Cyrillic letters that phonetically sound like "tax-e."

I give it 5 stars because it does an excellent job for its intended audience.

I am very disappointed with this book. I have been studying Russian since 2003 and am always looking for more speaking Russian books to get someone else's perspective. The entire book is transliterated (written in Latin characters.) This makes the book useless to me as I want to learn Russian not Russian written in "English." This book would only be useful for someone only wanting to have very basic conversations and has no interest in learning real Russian. The book will do nothing to help you figure out anything written in Russian with the proper Cyrillic alphabet. (Very important, if you are traveling to Russia, if you ask me.) I give it two stars ONLY because it may me useful to some.