The beginner's course for a fun and effective way to learn Russian. Specially written for people who have never learned a foreign language before, this best-selling course comprises a book and audio support which is easy to download to your MP3 player or iPod (components available separately).
I am a Russian speaker, so this book was of no educational value to me but a classmate of mine interested in learning the language asked me for some recommendations so I decided to read this book and try to put myself in the shoes of an absolute beginner before recommending anything.
Overall this was a pretty good book that I did end up recommending to my classmate, but it wasn’t my first choice. First off, this book isn’t sold anywhere with the recording (unless there’s a new edition or something) and although you don’t absolutely need it to learn with this book, many exercises require it and sometimes the translitérations aren’t the greatest so I would definitely point an absolute beginner in another direction because if you’ve never heard Russian before your pronunciation might be way off.
Another problem I had was that some things were badly explained. Right in the beginning the word ‘мы’ was transliterated as being pronounced ‘my’ when it fact it’s ‘me’ so that irked me, and that wasn’t the only instance of something like this or similar.
Overall, this wasn’t a bad book and I did give my copy to my classmate, but don’t let your language learning depend on this. It is a helpful tool but only in the bigger picture of learning Russian.