Take Off in Russian: More Audio Than Any Comparable Course: The Easiest Way to Learn Russian

by Nick Ukiah, Oxford University Press

Release Date: June, 2001

Edition: Audio CD

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Great value

This book is really worth the money. It comes with 5 hours of audio on CD or cassette. The narrator sounds like a Russian Arnold Schwarzenegger (complete with the occasional witticism).
I started learning Russian from Nicholas Brown's Penguin Russian course, which is a very professional book, but alas doesn't come with tapes. Sure, Brown gives good phonetic transcriptions, but you need the actual audio to reassure yourself you're actually saying the right thing! Nothing in language learning is so conspicuous as a good or bad accent, and I'm glad I have this unpretentious Oxford course to help me along.

So, you want to learn Russian...

This is an excellent way to get started in Russian. The blend of exercises in audio and written gives the student a lot of exposure to spoken and written Russian in very short order. One thing I really like about this is the mixing of functional and literary Russian in both the book and the tapes or CD. This will prepare the student for a variety of experiences in the language, both from a cultural and business perspective.

I will not say you get a lot of cultural exposure from the tapes, but rather, you will be prepared to access cultural material such as Russian magazines, newspapers, television, and the like. It isnt the fish, but rather the teaching how to fish.

The functional aspect of the course avoids stock phrasing, per se, but teaches you how to put things together in order to achieve the goal, such as buyin Pravda, or ice cream, or navigating the Metro. So you can get some work done, and have a good time while you are at it.

I would not say that one becomes an expert after finishing this course (I will let you know when I finish it.) But I am already beginning to enough in Pravda to figure out what the article is about. It is a great start on learning Russian as far as I am concerned.