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Even though the order is logical and it has a story, you can fall in errors that only a teacher can correct early on.[.].Overall good asset if you are into learning the language and committing to it. Definitely you will need some lessons too in order to be guided through the book. So far I have only gone through the first chapter because I am taking a course that is not intensive. The book is fine if you need to learn everything from scratch, like the alphabet.
Not so much.I love languages (I'm a foreign languages major). But case forms. Oh, "chess" is in the index, "backward buildup, principle of" is in the index.
It was smartly combined with audio materials and a marginally competent artist. And then they gave it a worthless index.The result. I imagine that this book was once a clever, cohesive text.
You're up at one in the morning searching for an thorough explanation/examples of the instrumental case and you have to dig through 300+ pages to find it, closely inspecting each page because new cases are introduced at random points in the book (and on the top, middle and bottom of pages and in similar black text) and "instrumental" isn't in the index. I love learning languages.This book does not help. Then a large storm/animal crashed through the writers' office the night before the final copy was due.
The authors threw together whatever pages they could find without severe damage in the morning and called it a wrap.
Big mistake. are covered over 2-3 chapters - and not always consecutive chapters - and the information is given out piecemeal.
Another problem is that this book is long on pictures and little cutsie-pie dialogues, but short on useful exercises. This is frustrating for an experienced instructor and I know from my students' comments that it is even more confusing for them.
I have been teaching Russian for 11 years and have had difficulty finding a good first-year textbook. For example, some of the grammatical cases (genitive, accusative, etc).
There are other problems as well, but the issues I outline here are enough to recommend to anyone considering this book to look elsewhere. Golosa left me wanting more, so I thought I'd try Nachalo.
The dearth of logical, simple, and effective first-year Russian books is the main reason I am in the middle of writing my own first-year Russian text.This book is organized in a haphazard manner, the logic of which I have yet to discern.
Although I had an hour of instruction in this language four days a week, it was still a struggle to use what I'd learned in any meaningful way, despite having learned two other languages and picked them up relatively quickly. Telling time and the date came several chapters later; phrases that might be useful for traveling were spread out across the entire book or never encountered at all.At the end of a year of Russian study with this book, I've retained almost nothing, and it isn't just me-- everyone who took the course with me felt that the text was confusing and placed emphasis on the wrong material. Having used several other language texts at the same level as this one, in two other languages, this text is hands-down the worst. Although I gather that this textbook is one of few Russian texts for English speakers to include extensive multimedia activities, and that is why it is often chosen, I would have dispensed with them to have a more organized text.This book did not present grammar in an organized way-- a single case might be taught over three [not consecutive] chapters, and the adjective endings for two or three cases crammed into one. There were comparatively few grammar activities, and the vocabulary learned seemed dictated by the activities of the characters in each chapter, whether or not this vocabulary was generally useful.In the second chapter, for example, much of the vocabulary is the names of instruments and musicians-- but we never learned body parts or colors.
overall, we came to the conclusion that the Nachalo series is one of the best language learning series we have encountered. My class has been using the Nachalo series for two years now, and have also tried other russian study books as supplimentary information. While some other books had better exercises, the Nachalo series had much better discriptions and much more vocabulary.
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