Ultimate Russian Advanced

By Living Language

Created for the serious language-learner, our deluxe Ultimate Russian Advanced course has been revised and updated. It teaches a sophisticated level of conversation and grammar and is equivalent to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400020700
• ISBN13: 9781400020706
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Living Language
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.9" x 1.2" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

Very good book and CD, with a few minor complaints

I bought Ultimate Russian Advanced several months ago hoping to improve my vocabulary, grammar, but most especially my listening comprehension. About the CD's: The book includes four CD's with very crisp, clear recordings of native Russians speaking to one another on topics likely to be encountered by a businessperson traveling and working in Russia, along with a few topics on cuisine, leisure and daily routines such as transportation and shopping. Each recording lasts around three minutes, and is followed by extract sentences from the dialogues that you've just listened to; after each extract sentence or phrase you have several seconds to repeat the native speaker's words and intonation. This type of exercise is very useful for boosting listening comprehension, and one's ability to repeat unfamiliar phrases. As a couple of reviewers noted, the English transcript can be a shade off in meaning from the Russian one, but overall I think the quality and content of the recordings is laudable, especially as this is to my knowledge the only textbook with listening exercises geared for an intermediate to upper-intermediate level student. About the book: I have been living in Russia for over two years and doing my best to learn the language. Frequently, when speaking with Russians, I hear what I think must be exceptions to grammatical rules, and this book has so far done a fine job of giving very practical, very straightforward explanations for many aspects of Russian grammar that had previously left me scratching my head, for example chto-nibud' versus chto-to and chto-libo, the difference between perfective and imperfective command forms, and many others. The grammatical explanations, which are backed up by concrete example from modern, colloquial Russian speech, illustrate these grammar points well. After the grammar explanations follow written exercises including translation, word order exercises, and fill in the blank, which manage to review the key points from the chapter. While the exercises are useful, there are simply not enough of them- usually about twenty sentences in all, not nearly enough to reinforce knowledge of the grammar points they deal with, especially in chapters where two grammar points get covered. This problem is partly rectified by a link to internet exercises provided in the book, but the real solution would be to buy a separate grammar reference/ workbook to complete the ensemble. A few minor complaints: -One of the chapters refers to an appendix containing a table of Russian numerals declined in all cases, but this table has been for whatever reason left out- an annoying omission requiring some searching in the net for answers. -A few times the answer key and the transcript differ, chiefly on points where more than one answer is possible. A note explaining the difference in meaning between the two answers would be useful. -One point of grammar is omitted: the uncountable plural numerals, which are used with some common Russi

Supplemental Russian

I have a slightly older version of this product, but based on viewing other reviews am confident that its basic worth remains intact. I have 3.5 years of university Russian and have spent time in Russia in addition to speaking Russian at home on a regular basis. For me the CDs are the point; the book is for support and clarification. This is not a language program for beginners; you will not go from zero to fluency with this set. I used it a few years back to supplement my book learning when I realized that there are very few people with whom to speak Russian in the US on a daily basis. As another reviewer noted, learning Russian language is very demanding, and I don't think it can be done well without a significant amount of listening to Russians speaking Russian. This program offers not only listening, as you might be able to do with streamed news from Russia, but it gives you the opportunity to first, listen to a dialogue, and then, to interact with the dialogue, both answering questions and parroting the narrator--which does wonders for your pronunciation, surpassing by far listening to your American classmates, for example. There are/were also useful exercises based on the lessons. The ideal use for this product, in my opinion, is during exercise and highway driving to polish up and augment your previous learning. The lessons, listed in another review, range from interesting to overly specialized--boring (I really don't need to know joint-venture construction vocabularly; hopefully they dropped that lesson). This is the program's weakness. Yet, all of the listening is useful and practical, and the sound quality is excellent. As another rater states, this is not high literature, but is conducted in more the practical Russian that Russians actually speak, which is often lamentably absent from academic courses, where you get plenty of Gogol and Dostoyevski then can't understand your bus driver in Moscow.

Great for the Money but...

Great product. I listen to the CDs in my car to/from work in preperation for a language proficeincy test. Awesome review of grammar. Great price, but some of the language used is not current or unspoken in Moscow.

Very good all around

You get twenty lessons. Each one starts with a dialog that's word-for-word the same as the corresponding lesson on the CDs. The subjects, engaging enough, range over situations like "visit to an antique store", "job interview", "at the airport", "at a wedding", "at a computer show", "visit to a factory", "visit to a farm", "visit to a hospital", "TV news", "at a movie festival", "visit to St. Petersburg". Chekhov's plays they are not, but they are way more interesting than typical textbook fare, and Chekhov won't teach you how to say "buckle your seatbelt and prepare for landing". Following each dialog you get a translation, which is usually fine but occasionally a bit loose. For example, "Kakye proizvedenya iskustva vam osobeno nravitsa" (p.133) is rendered "Is there any particular type of art that appeals to you". If you don't know "proizvedenya" or "osobeno", you'll be headed for your dictionary. On the other hand, the "primechanya" -- about a dozen or so footnotes to each dialog -- are outstanding little word vignettes that impart the kind of context and depth you won't get in any dual-language dictionary. (You know how dictionaries try to cover a word's full range by giving you about four or five English words each of which means a distinctly different thing -- which is ok if you're trying to understand what you're reading, but less useful as a guide to your own attempts at speaking Russian.) Following that, each chapter gives you a section on grammar (which will be mostly review to the likely customers for this book, but it doesn't hurt and it's presented nicely). Then a section on idiomatic expressions (usually related somewhat to the theme of the dialog). And finally, in English, a couple pages of cultural background (for example, in the "at a movie festival" chapter, a little essay on the Soviet and post-Soviet movie industry. These are all quite interesting (and in an ideal world would have been presented in Russian).) You get eight CDs. Four of them are, as mentioned, the same as the twenty lessons' dialogs. The other four are a miscellany meant for practice while on your stairmaster or whatever; a voice says something in English, and then you're supposed to translate to Russian. I'm not sure how or where this book and its CDs would work as a substitute or supplement to a traditional college Russian course, as I've picked up my Russian on my own. I came to this material already pretty good at reading but quite inept at following real normal-speed Russian conversation. Accordingly, I've concentrated on listening to the CDs -- over and over, decoding a few more words each time before resorting to the book to pick off the most stubborn trouble spots. Now two months into it, the improvement in my listening ability is marked, and I speak better too.

A good foundation.

This book and CD set is a good introduction to the Russian language. Ignore the other reviewer's remark that the lessons "don't reflect a particular learning theory". Good language lessons don't have to reflect one particular theory. The book contains clearly laid-out lessons and grammar explanations, and the dialogues, vocabulary and grammar talks on the CDs are very well recorded. Slavic languages like Russian are so complex that it's hard for English speakers to learn them without being socially immersed in the language to some degree, so after studying with this or any other Russian self-teaching program alone, you may not be able to talk yet. However, if you finish this program you will have enough of a foundation that once you are in a social setting you should see your speaking skills improve rapidly.