Description
Book SynopsisWhether you’re learning alone or attending classes, you’ll find this complete Russian language course for beginners both accessible and indispensable. Designed to provide the student with an excellent command of basic Russian (the equivalent of A’ level standard) the book features thirty lessons punctuated by revision exercises to ensure you have fully understood what you have learned. The emphasis is on acquiring vocabulary, experiencing conversational language and learning useful grammar. The book also includes a vocabulary of 1,500 words and a glossary of grammatical terms.
Table of ContentsThe New Penguin Russian CourseIntroduction
Acknowledgments
1. Learning to Read RussianAlphabet and Pronunciation; Transliteration; Street Signs
2. Russian Handwriting; More on Pronunciation
3. Everyday Phrases; Basic Grammar
Naming Things; Basic Grammar; Gender; Map of Russia
4. Doing Things - Verbs; Personal Pronouns
Present Tense; Conjugations; Word Stress; Nouns and Cases; Conversation in the Metro
5. Asking Questions; The Prepositional Case
Indeclinable Nouns; Dialogues
6. Possession; Going Places; The Accusative Case
Russian Personal Names; Dialogues
7. Describing Things: Adjectives
Masculine, Feminine and Neuter Adjectives; "What kind of...?"; "This" and "That"; Prepositional and Accusative Cases of Adjectives; Adverbs; Moscow Street Map
8. Plurals; Spelling Rules; Buying Things
Spelling Rule 1; "Is There...?"; Spelling Rule 2; Map of Europe
9. Numbers; The Genitive Case
1-5,000; Genitive Singular and Plural; Quantities; Roubles and Dollars; Buying Things; Street Market
10. "To Have"; More on the Genitive
Genitive Pronouns; "There Isn't"; Prepositions Taking the Genitive; Genitive of Adjectives; "Whether"; Dialogues
11. The Past; Reflexive Verbs
The Founding of St. Petersburg
12. The Future; Aspect; The Dative Case
Imperfective and Perfective; "To Want"; Dative; "To Give"; "To Please"; Spelling Rules 3 and 4; Prepositional Plural; In the Restaurant; Visiting Friends
13. Aspect in the Past; Use of Tenses
Aspect of the Infinitive; Reported Speech; More about "Whether"; Dialogue
14. Aspect in the Future; Impersonal Constructions
Dialogue
15. Requests and the Imperative
Summary of Aspect Use; Two Lost Tourists; Phoning a Bureaucrat
16. The Instrumental Case
TOT and TÓT; Declension of Surnames; A Family at Home; Volodia and the KGB
17. Time, Date, Age; Ordinal Numbers
Months; Years; The Daily Life of Chaikovskii (Tchaikovsky)
18. The Comparative; Superlatives; Relative Clauses with
("Who," "Which"); Victor Wants to Meet Mary; Siberian Superlatives; Map of Siberia
19. The Conditional; Obligation; Prefixes
Mary Seeks an Absent-Minded Professor
20. Verbs of Motion: Going, Running, Bringing
Travelling Around; Tania in Motion
21. Possession; Purpose
Mr. Thornwaite Doesn't Like His Hotel; Was Turgenev a Revolutionary?
22. Fun with Numbers
Declension of Numbers; "Both"; Collective Numerals; Fractions; Soviet Divorce Statistics
23. Time Expressions
"When?"; "How Long?"; Vadim and Eva; Mr. Kuznetsov and Mr. Pope
24. Negation; Place of He
Nothing, Nobody, Never; A Pineapple, but No Bananas
25. Diminutives; Proper Names; Politeness
"The Fox and the Rolling-Pin"
26. Indefinite Pronouns; Word Order; Writing Letters
A Letter to Mrs. Pope
27. Participles: Types and Stress
A Classic Film
28. Verbal Adverbs
Peter the Great; A Recipe for Mushroom Solianka
29. "Bookish" Style; Active Participles; Punctuation; Short-Form Adjectives
Vladivostok; The Winter Palace
30. Abbreviations; Names of Russian Letters; Particles
A Complete Chekhov Story; Fat and Thin
Grammatical Tables
The Four Spelling Rules
Russian-English Vocabulary
English-Russian Vocabulary
Key to Exercises and Translation of Texts
Glossary of Grammatical Terms
Index
