Oxford Take Off in Russian

By Nick Ukiah

Research into language learning has proved that the easiest and most effective way to learn to speak or write a foreign language is by developing the key skills of listening and comprehension. With almost 5 hours of audio content, reinforced by a clearly laid-out course book, this course offers an innovative approach to language learning. Oxford Take off in Russian is designed specifically to meet the needs of beginner speakers learning Russian on their own. It offers a comprehensive Russian language course for anyone from the absolute beginner to the student who wants to brush up on forgotten language skills. This course book is also available as a pack with the audio content on CD (0198603118), or on cassette (019860310x)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198603126
• ISBN13: 9780198603122
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.7" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

a fun way to start off in a hard language

The book and audio course is one the best places that a would-be learner of Russian could choose to start. The lessons build quickly from everyday greetings and polite phrases to simple everyday conversations and nothing is introduced in the spoken dialogues that isn't explained right there in the lesson, so there won't be any unpleasant surprises or mysteries of grammar that the student will have to slog onto future lessons to have come clear. By the time that a learner finishes the course they will actually, in addition to having rapidly improving skills in speaking, a pretty good feel for how Russian grammar works- they will of course have much more of the language still to learn, but there won't be anything particularly daunting in the structure of the language that they will meet up with. The courses in this series offer a generous amount of audio- an essential for learning any language and particularly one with unfamiliar combinations of sounds. It must be said that there are other courses that offer much more extensive explanations of pronunciation (check out 'Colloquial Russian') The dialogues themselves are enjoyable and the presenter has a very clear and friendly delivery (and a fun Russian accent). At the end of all of the units except the review units, there is an ongoing story about a Russian family as they make their way around. The review units and self-tests are a particularly valuable feature of the book- students will know exactly where they are and what they have to do next.

Excellent introduction to conversational Russian

I use this book/CD set in a beginning conversation class at City College of San Francisco and have found it to be practical, engaging, and quite challenging for the students. We cover the material in detail and I supplement it with many exercises, which are necessary for developing fluency, but the book itself is outstanding, at least when used in a class context. After the first semester, several of my beginning students went to Russia and were able to identify important signs, ask for a few food items in a restaurant, express a few desires and hope to understand some basic responses to their questions. Situations and expressions given in the book allow students to enjoy role-playing while learning essential constructions. I was amazed at how much they managed to accomplish by the end of the year. For a student studying alone, the program is quite challenging, but worth trying. The booklet, however, fell apart almost immediately. Both my students and I have resorted to photocopying and sometimes enlarging individual pages of the text, as we used them intensively.

My Favorite Russian Course

I have been studying Russian, on my own, for about a year. I have tried Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and many other courses. The other courses, although very good for what they are, seemed to be lacking in one area or another. I also seemed to get bored with the other programs. With this book and CDs, I wanted to keep learning. This course will teach you all the aspects of beginning Russian, at the fastest pace and the cheapest price, which is why I chose it as my favorite Russian learning course.

Great value

This book is really worth the money. It comes with 5 hours of audio on CD or cassette. The narrator sounds like a Russian Arnold Schwarzenegger (complete with the occasional witticism).I started learning Russian from Nicholas Brown's Penguin Russian course, which is a very professional book, but alas doesn't come with tapes. Sure, Brown gives good phonetic transcriptions, but you need the actual audio to reassure yourself you're actually saying the right thing! Nothing in language learning is so conspicuous as a good or bad accent, and I'm glad I have this unpretentious Oxford course to help me along.

So, you want to learn Russian...

This is an excellent way to get started in Russian. The blend of exercises in audio and written gives the student a lot of exposure to spoken and written Russian in very short order. One thing I really like about this is the mixing of functional and literary Russian in both the book and the tapes or CD. This will prepare the student for a variety of experiences in the language, both from a cultural and business perspective.I will not say you get a lot of cultural exposure from the tapes, but rather, you will be prepared to access cultural material such as Russian magazines, newspapers, television, and the like. It isnt the fish, but rather the teaching how to fish.The functional aspect of the course avoids stock phrasing, per se, but teaches you how to put things together in order to achieve the goal, such as buyin Pravda, or ice cream, or navigating the Metro. So you can get some work done, and have a good time while you are at it.I would not say that one becomes an expert after finishing this course (I will let you know when I finish it.) But I am already beginning to enough in Pravda to figure out what the article is about. It is a great start on learning Russian as far as I am concerned.