Review: Read Russian in Just 90 Minutes
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 25, 2012
This book is designed to give an English speaker a quick understanding of written Russian words. While it won't make you fluent in speaking Russian, the book would do what it promises - make you able to recognize Russian letters and put together words that would sound very close to how a native Russian speaker would pronounce them.This book's strong points:- A quick reference table for sounding out the Russian characters is provided.- Groupings of Russian characters as compared to English characters gives the learner an instant anchor in understanding the Russian alphabet.- Word construction is simply explained.- The exercises for word construction provided to progressively go from the easiest for an English speaker to recognize to more complex.- The book also has a quick run down of Top Ten Words in Russian, Simple Questions, Common Nouns, and some Dialog as exercises for reading.I'd like to see a little bit more word exercises included in earlier chapters since they are well organized and explained. The chapter on stressing the written words might benefit from more examples. These are not, however, major problems - after working through this book and using it for reference, you should be able to open any Russian book or go to a Russian website and continue your reading practice with higher proficiency than you had before.I'd highly recommend this book for students of Russian language on a beginner and early intermediate levels. It will also be useful for more advanced students as a quick reference.