Igenlode Wordsmith’s Reviews > The Penguin Russian Course > Status Update

Alas, this book is now almost totally disintegrated...

A far simpler version of gerunds than the 'Colloquial Russian' chapter... which doesn't drill you anything like so hard on the irregularities. Ideally one would probably have done this one first to get a grip on the basics, then the other one for all the myriad exceptions!
(Also, they are not including the passive but only the active gerunds- splitting them across multiple chapters really makes more sense.)

I thought I'd heard enough dates flying past to have a handle on this. Turns out that I haven't... and it doesn't help that I can rattle off тысяча девятьсот девяносто by rote, but struggle to construct dates in the 21st century :D

In Lesson 19 (of 30) we *finally* get an extremely cursory introduction to perfective and imperfective verbs, as opposed to the far more confusing verbs of motion, which were introduced back in Lesson 11...

Aarrgghh, numbers!

You can't help but admire a textbook that contains sample sentences like "He was killed by a tiger" or "My uncle is in hospital and my aunt is in prison. Unfortunately it is not possible to visit my aunt" - so much more entertaining than that dull Spanish course book about the type of souvenirs to be bought in South America!

I have zero recollection of this negative-genitive business, but there is a logic to it: one has a thing, but none OF a thing :-)
(And likewise много, which I do know and which they haven't mentioned yet...)