2008-07-04 Ideal for gaining confidence in Russian

I bought this course without having followed the Foundation Course in the same series - I'd learnt some Russian through other self-study courses, and wanted to take things further. I managed to get into this course straight away, as you can follow the lessons easily without reference to the previous course. In fact, I'd say that Russian learners across a range of levels could get into this quite quickly - most of the material is presented and explained as new language, and you can pick up any words you haven't covered as everything is translated into English anyway.

The teacher-pupil format isn't unique to audio courses, but it works particularly well here; the teacher (an amenable but quite strict Russian lady!) takes her male and female student through a series of short grammatical / vocabulary points and subsequent translation exercises. It's quite fun to try and preempt the students in these tasks, and beat them to saying the Russian out loud!

I was surprised how well and clearly the grammatical points were put across; for instance, I've not come across a clearer explanation of imperfective and perfective aspect in verbs than in this course - the teacher's way of explaining this particular point may not be the orthodox route, but it made more sense than any dry grammar.

In short, it's fantastic for teaching you some important rules to improve your confidence in Russian, and get you used to using what you know to communicate (and not overcomplicating things by translating word for word!).