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Title: First Thousand Words in Russian (Picture Word Books) by Heather Amery ISBN: 0-86020-769-2 Publisher: E.D.C. Publishing Pub. Date: 01 February, 1984 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.15 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great for native english speakers learning russian!
Comment: I bought this book the summer before I enrolled in my first Russian course for college. Long story short; I went into class with an impressive vocabulary at my command! It makes an excellent companion book and accomplishes what it sets out to do...It teaches you allot of nouns! All with amusing pictures in full vibrant color (the nasty green and maroon colored cover shown above seems to be out of date) so you don't get bored. While the words don't have stress marks which is important in spoken Russian, the transliterations are good enough so that if you have a basic knowledge of pronunciation then it is easy to find the stress. Unless you like reading endless lists of nouns from textbooks, this book cant be beat!
Rating: 3
Summary: two major shortcomings
Comment: As a beginning student of Russian I thought this book might be a good vocabulary builder, and for the most part that is true. The illustrations aren't always sufficient to identify the word depicted, but there is an English translation in the back so that's only a minor annoyance. Another minor annoyance is that words are given in either singular or plural form, whereas it would have been nice if both were included.
However, I found two major shortcomings relating to pronunciation. One that has been mentioned in the other reviews is the lack of anything indicating stress, which could easily have been done with either accent marks on the word itself or by capitalizing the accented syllable in the phonetic rendering (PEESma).
The other major shortcoming is that certain vagaries of pronunciation aren't taken into account, such as the devoicing of a consonant at the end of a word (e.g. the word for iron would be more correctly rendered as "ootyook" rather than "ootyoog") and the assimilation of consonants when they occur together ("foodbol" rather than "footbol").
I still would recommend this book but I also recommend getting a good dictionary that shows word stress and making sure you learn the rules of pronunciation and take them into account.
Rating: 2
Summary: I Didn't Buy the Book Because...
Comment: ...the words are not stressed. For beginners who don't have a native Russian speaker around to pronounce the words for them, it is absolutely essential that each word show the vowel that is stressed. Normally, in textbooks for beginning Russian students, this is done by placing a stress mark over the stressed vowel. Unfortunately, this book does not do that. Like English, Russian words are pronounced quite differently depending on the placement of the primary stress. The reader of this book will not know, for example, how the word "aftobus" ("bus" in English) should be pronounced: AHf-to-boos, ahf-TO-boos, or ahf-to-BOOS. The correct pronunciation is ahf-TO-boos. No doubt most American speakers, analogizing from "automobile" (AW-tuh-muh-beel), would pronounce it AHf-to-boos. And is the word for "watch" pronounced "CHAH-see" or "chih-SEE"? The latter is closer to the correct pronunciation. But without a sress mark to show this, how is one to know? In addition, in conversation most speakers of Russian nowadays pronounce the consonant "shch" not as sh + ch (as in "freSH CHeese"), but as a fronted "shsh" (as in "I wiSH SHe wouldn't do that"). Although the concept of the dictionary is good, because of the lack of stress marks I don't think it's worth buying.
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Title: Favorite Russian Fairy Tales (Dover Children's Thrift Classics) by Arthur Ransome ISBN: 0486286320 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 29 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $1.00 |
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Title: Russian Picture Word Book: Learn over 500 Commonly Used Russian Words Through Pictures (Foreign Language Anyone?) by Svetlana Rogers ISBN: 0486426718 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $3.95 |
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Title: Lonely Planet Russian Phrasebook: With Two-Way Dictionary (Lonely Planet Russian Phrasebook) by James Jenkin, Inna Zaitseva ISBN: 1864501065 Publisher: Lonely Planet Publications Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Easy Russian Phrase Book : Over 690 Basic Phrases for Everyday Use (Dover Easy Phrase Books) by Helen Michailoff ISBN: 048628669X Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 29 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: The New Penguin Russian Course (Penguin Handbooks) by Nicholas J. Brown ISBN: 0140120416 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1996 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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