This is a complete course in spoken and written Russian. If you have never learned Russian before, or if you need to brush up your language skills, Teach Yourself Russian is for you. Daphne West has created a practical course that is both fun and easy to work through. She explains everything clearly along the way and gives you plenty of opportunities to practice what you have learned. The course structure allows you to work at your own pace, arranging your learning to suit your needs. The course contains graded units of dialogues, culture notes, grammar and exercises; a step-by-step guide to the Russsian alphabet and its pronunciation; an extensive grammar summary; and a Russian-English vocabulary list. By the end of the course you'll be able to cope with a whole range of situations and participate fully and confidently in conversation.
Simply insufficient without the "Teach Yourself Russian Grammar" guide. When I tried to learn anything from this book it didn't stick. Over-reliant on thematic dialogues.
Teach Yourself is the best guide out there for learning another language. There may be better guides, but you can bet they're more expensive. There are also severely over-rated guides like Pimsluer, who will as promised teach you to converse in another language quick and easy, so long as your idea of learning a language means using eight cds to learn four paragraphs worth of dialogue.
The Russian guide is severely lacking in grammar guides, audio exercises, but is still quite helpful. You will have to learn Cyrillic to proceed with it though.
I stopped because I had other business to attend to rather than learn Russian. I made it 5 chapters into the book and it was definitely worth the $20 I paid for it. The lessons were just the right size with enough redundancy that by the end of the chapter I felt comfortable with the material covered. Grammar was covered as necessary.
I pick it up when I have time and have learned 5-10 expressions and beginning to really recognize the alphabet and sounds each letter or sign makes. : )