chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6093 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian
| Message 1 of 5 06 December 2008 at 5:01am | IP Logged |
I read the Amazon reviews and apparently the biggest problem is that the book lacks accent marks. I'm thinking about getting it regardless, but that depends on how much vocabulary is presented in the book, how it's presented, and what type of exercises it has.
I'm thinking that the stress marks are forgiveable because: If I were to use native sources to improve my vocabulary (as I'm doing now), I would be looking up words for stress anyways. If this book provides a couple thousand high frequency, common vocabulary words in one place, then I think it would still be worth my time. Besides, the activity of going through and marking stress marks manually probably would be helpful for learning.
So, does anyone have the book, and if so...can you describe how it is organized (ie. which themes) and roughly how many words it has?
Edited by chelovek on 06 December 2008 at 5:05am
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josht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6452 days ago 635 posts - 857 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Spanish, Russian, Dutch
| Message 2 of 5 06 December 2008 at 9:38am | IP Logged |
I can't answer your question (I don't have the book), but you might want to wait just a little bit longer; Cambridge University is publishing Using Russian Vocabulary in May of 2009. I've used the German and French versions of this, and both are excellent. I expect the Russian version to be up to par.
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tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6684 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian
| Message 3 of 5 06 December 2008 at 1:33pm | IP Logged |
I have this book, but I must admit I haven't used it much ^^
It is mainly constructed in the following way: introductory sentences/dialogues for each chapter, fill-in-the-gaps texts, more dialogues with the same words plus some more, fill in the gaps..., questions, full vocabulary list.
I think I will start using it now. When I last tried it, I knew like 100 words and it was just argh frustration everything is new, whereas I now know most of the "surrounding" words.
Themes... At the airport, at the trainstation, at the market, at the doctors, the computer, business... altogether 28 chapters.
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chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6093 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian
| Message 4 of 5 07 December 2008 at 7:02am | IP Logged |
Thanks guys. I went ahead and bought it since it was pretty cheap anyways. It should arrive in a few days so I guess I'll see.
I really wish they had one of those "Master [Language]: A Thematic Approach" books for Russian. Those titles don't have readings or sample dialogues, but it's a really handy reference for all of the words you're likely to encounter on a daily basis.
Oh well. The Using Russian Vocab book looks pretty good, so I'll probably pick that one up too.
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chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6093 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian
| Message 5 of 5 10 December 2008 at 12:52pm | IP Logged |
The book arrived today from Amazon, and it definitely doesn't deserve all of the bad reviews I've read. Aside from the lack of accent marks, the content is great. It goes into quite a bit of detail for all of its themes, and my only complaint is that some of the chapters are rather lacking in exercises. It presents most vocab in list-form, but instead of words, it has the vocab in the context of sentences. So, it's basically like a sentence list. There are pictures in all of the chapters, and some of the chapters have readings that summarize everything in a larger context.
All in all...good investment for any intermediate or advanced learner, as it will thoroughly cover pretty much all of the important thematic vocabulary that you're going to encounter on a daily basis.
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