Troika: A Communicative Approach to Russian Language, Life, and Culture

by Marita Nummikoski

Book Overview

This communicative, "natural approach" to introductory Russian emphasizes reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. Everyday topics are presented to allow readers to begin communicating immediately. Grammar is presented as a necessary tool for communication and is introduced throughout. The book aims at comparing and contrasting cultures, rather than presenting the target culture only.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471309451
• ISBN13: 9780471309451
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 640 Pages
• Weight: 2.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 8.1" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

Troika is a great book and the Professor is great!

Ok, for all of those people who have ordered this book (both textbook and workbook), let me emphasize something: this book is meant to be used as an in-class book only. I have had Russian classes with Dr. Nummikoski for the past three years. The book it is primarily geared to be used in the classroom only. If you are in class every day and the professor knows how to utilize the book then the book is recommended, but if you just want to learn on your own, do not buy this book as you will need the audio files she has. The workbook is great too. There is no CD associated with the book and I can understand people's frustration about that. For those who want to teach themselves Russian try buying Rosetta Stone.

This is a good Russian textbook to start out with.

This is the textbook we used for our Russian classes in college. I studied under the author for 2 semesters at UT-San Antonio. My other Russian professor (for the other 2 semesters) was Ukrainian. Even after 2 years of studying Russian, I didn't consider myself fluent. It will take further study (either on your own or with others) to become truly fluent in Russian, but this book is a good start.

Very helpful.

I ordered this to accompany the Pimsleur Language Russian program, as Pimsleur, although very powerful for learning to speak, has little more than a pamphlet to teach you to read. So, I picked this up, and it is very handy. It has made the process of learning to read fairly easay and enjoyable. I would have rated this a 3, however, because you lose a LOT of the meat of the book if you don't have the audio recordings, which aren't included in the book. At least, they weren't with mine. However, I poked around online and found that they're available for download off this website: http://mllc.utsa.edu/troika/student/mp3.htm I don't know how long that site will be up, but if you intend to use this book to teach yourself to read and speak, those MP3s will be invaluable.

Almost five stars

I am using this book in my Russian 101 class right now. The book itself is well organized and the grammer rules are clearly presented, but this book is in desperate need of a set of(or at least one)CD's to practice pronunciation with. The lab audiocassettes that are available don't go over the exercises in the book, just the listening exercises in the workbook. If this book came with some audio materials, it would get five stars. It is great for someone who is just getting a start in Russian.

Not bad for beginners

My university uses this book in first-year Russian. To be honest, I hated this book for the first several chapters/weeks. It takes a while to get used to the way it is arranged, because everything is presented in Russian first, then explained in English at the end. This is somewhat overwhelming for the beginner; however, if you aren't willing to plow on through, you probably won't be a very successful Russian speaker anyway. Anyone who expects a textbook to magically make learning Russian easy is probably in for an unpleasant surprise no matter what book they choose.Once we got used to the format, however, this book works very well. Unfortunately there is no intermediate book to follow it up yet, so our university had us using a completely different textbook for second-year. After using the new textbook, which is not very good and way too expensive for a paperback, I realize how good Troika really was. There aren't a whole lot of Beginner Russian textbooks out there, so if you're looking into a new textbook for your class, take a look at this one.