Andrew, Ph.D. Kaufman, Serafima, Ph.D. Gettys, Nina Wieda
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Subjects -> Reference -> Dictionaries & Thesauruses -> Foreign Language -> Russian
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18
Average rating: 3.5 of 5
íèêàêàÿ êèðèëëèöà? (No Cyrillic?) 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.
This book is quite handy...that is if you don't ever plan on reading anything in Russia. I don't understand why there isn't any cyrillic, except for the alphebet (big help!) at the beginning, you would think the being able to read Russian would help. Besides this slight error the book is quite good. A recomendation though would be to buy a cheap russian-english dictionary with this book.
Of only limited use 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.
If you have never studied Russian, and expect to be in country for only a short period as a tourist and want to learn a couple of phrases to get around, this book will do the job admirably. For anyone who wants to really learn the language to become reasonably fluent and conversant in the language, this is not the book for you.
The most obvious problem involves the decision of the authors not to use the Cyrillic alphabet at all, but rather to transliterate everything into the Roman alphabet. This will obviously pose a tremendous problem should the student then actually travel to a Russian speaking country and find everything written in Cyrillic; and worse, the pronunciation guides become pretty confusing and hard to use. The conversations on the CD are vital to gaining real understanding of the pronunciation of the language.
The book is broken down into chapters based on general areas of interest to the tourist, i.e. introductions, food in restaurants, directions, getting around, and so on. These chapters then give you useful phrases, and reasonably short vocabulary to master, all again in Roman alphabet. The categories are well thought out, presented in a format very easy to assimilate, and with a certain amount of humor which makes the medicine go down a little easier.
The authors make clear that the aim of the book is to give you access to some words, phrases, and sentence building tools which will make it possible to communicate the basics in Russian, and not to achieve fluency. That's fine so long as the student knows that going in, although if that is all you want you might be better off with the Pimsleur CD sets (though these are expensive). If you want to achieve greater control over the language, skip this book entirely, and work with a program that immerses you in the Cyrillic alphabet from the start. Using this book in conjunction with a course that works in Cyrillic will only confuse the student.
Editorial Review:
Russian is spoken by nearly 450 million people, and demand for Russian-speakers is growing. This introductory course includes an audio CD with practice dialogues-just the ticket for readers who need basic Russian for business, school, or travel. Serafima Gettys, PhD (Newark, CA), is Coordinator of the Foreign Language Program at Lewis University.
Andrew Kaufman, PhD (Charlottesville, VA), is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia.
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
