I really enjoyed reading this book for two reasons. First, the Grammar is explained in such a way that it doesn't feel like someone is explaining Grammar! Grammar is most of the time what people hate most about a language. Artemiy makes it just so damn simple as if you're reading an interesting story. The result is that the information sticks to your memory. Second, the book is packed with what you need to know if you are an absolute beginner. It's not a 400 pages book about Russian language. Thanks God! I also liked the diagrams explaining propositions. That was very creative. In short, an excellent concise introductory guide for those who want to learn Russian.
A wonderful and easy to understand source for anyone beginning to study the Russian language. The Cyrillic alphabet, often a source of real difficulty, is explained. An effort is made to simplify and also to give phonetic pronunciations of the language. Frequent words and phrases like days of the week, numbers, etc., are covered. Real time situations such as restaurants and banks are also covered. If you are just beginning to struggle with the Russian language you need this introduction. It does come with a CD but you will need a more comprehensive CD course to complement it.
I cannot think of a better way to begin to learn Russian than this book.
The book itself has 7 stories. Each one a few pages long with 7-10 lines on each page. As the author states, and as can be seen from the preview, there is a smaller text English translation running below the Russian text. So I can read, even though I don't know the words, and look below the line for the meaning of each word. If I read this a few times, I believe I can pick up some vocabulary with context - although since Russian has cases, this does make it difficult since words decline differently based on case. So you do need some prior understanding of Russian grammar. On the whole I'm hopeful of being able to use this book to improve vocabulary, and given the $3 kindle price, I think the juice is worth the squeeze.
In How to Get Really Good at Russian, discover how you can easily conquer the Russian language using highly effective methods and strategies used by polyglots (language learning experts). These methods and techniques can even be used to learn Russian phrases, vocabulary, and grammar from TV shows, movies, videos, music, and video games.
The vocabulary of the book is excellent for me, and the authors repeat many of the verbs and other vocabularies in each story so as to reinforce them. This book has helped my Russian quite a bit. In recent years the emphasis has been on active vocabulary in language learning. Overall I thought it was an excellent book for me of Russian language.
