Russian: A Self-Teaching Guide

by Kathryn Szczepanska

Russian

a self-teaching guide

Learn Russian at your own pace

How do Russian letters differ from English letters? How do you choose the correct form of specific verbs? What are some useful, everyday Russian words? With A Self-Teaching Guide, you'll discover the answers to these questions and many more about this challenging language.

This thorough primer presents an easy-to-follow, proven method for grasping the basics of Russian, complete with helpful tips on writing and pronouncing Cyrillic characters and building your Russian vocabulary. You get lively dialogues and reading exercises, concise lessons on grammar and usage, notes on Russian culture, and a compact Russian-English glossary. The clearly structured format of Russian makes it fully accessible, providing an easily understood, comprehensive overview for everyone from students to business and leisure travelers to Russian culture mavens.

Like all Self-Teaching Guides, Russian allows you to build gradually on what you have learned--at your own pace. Questions and self-tests reinforce the information in each chapter and allow you to skip ahead or focus on specific areas of concern. Packed with useful, up-to-date information, this clear, concise volume is a valuable learning tool and reference source for anyone who wants to improve his or her understanding of basic Russian.

Genres: Language, Textbooks

312 pages, Paperback

First published May 6, 2005

Reviews

[Ace · Rating 3 out of 5]

In conjunction with The Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Russian and a separate grammar book, Kathryn Szczepanska's guide helped me learn approximately a semester's worth of Russian on my own. This book is easy to understand as well as useful; it provides examples and charts when applicable. It breaks down difficult topics for native English speakers, such as the mysterious case system and declensions; Russian felt a lot less confusing after going through this book!

[null · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very neat book for those who aim to get acquainted very fast with basic Russian grammar usage and overall russian learning insights for what's needed to master in order to speak like a native.

My 0.2¢ of advise goes to those not very familiar with the ecosystem of language acquisition and formal language study. This could be very tough for you if you're a newcomer in the universe of language learning, so I would recommend this one as a supplementary material.

[Rhiannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find this book's grammar sections, while oddly split apart, are each categorized and broken down in ways that are easy for beginners like myself to get the basic language-building tools that will serve us for years.