useful, but it could have been better

This is a useful resource to improve your Russian, but it could have been much better.
In summary, the pros are: 
-A collection of texts with a lot of useful vocabulary, divided up in easily-digestible chunks a few minute long. 
-Recordings for all the texts by a Russian native speaker with a pleasant voice.
-Fairly low price.
Cons:
-Texts are not specific to Russia and are a little dull.
-No accent marks in the Russian text.

Here is a more detailed review. This book is part of a series of language book with the title: '30 stories in language X for beginners'. As far as I can tell they are based on the very same 30 "stories", which have been translated into various languages.These are not self-contained stories with a proper beginning and a conclusion, such as fairy tales or short novels. Rather, they are short texts or chapters.Out the 30 chapters, 20 are about are about an English family and their day-to-day activities: going to work, doing the washing up, going on a trip to Disneyland, walking the dog. The remaining 10 chapters deal with a miscellanea of topics related to day-to-day life (2 cooking recipes, a description of Chester, texts on the role of smartphones and of the Internet in modern society, a chapter on how to choose a holiday destination...). Each chapter is about three minute long, for a total running time of about one hour and a half. The vocabulary introduced is good and useful, but the texts are a little dull: don't expect cliffangers, big adventures or a lot of humour. Also, the stories have absolutely nothing to do with Russia, so you won't learn anything about Russian traditions, culture, proverbs, idioms and so on. What we are dealing with is, pretty much, a translation into Russian of an intermediate-level English primer. If you are looking for something more entertaining and specific to Russia I'd rather recommend the 'Rasskaz' series by Ignaty Dyakov.
Another qualm is that the Russian texts in the PDF do not have accent marks, which are indispensable to beginners if they want to learn the correct pronunciation of words; having the audio is obviously useful, but it does not make up for the missing stress marks.
In fact, in a Russian book for learners I'd like to see all sorts of information concerning words with pronunciation peculiarities (e.g., words such as энергия or теннис, which are pronounced as if they were spelled энэргия and тэннис).
As stated in its title this book has 30 chapters, however the audio version has more than 90 sections. This is because the whole book is presented three times: in the first run there it alternates a few sentences in Russian, then the same sentences in English, and so on. Personally I don't like this format, I found it very boring to have to listen to each sentence twice and I prefer having all the Russian in one go.Then there are Russian-only recordings, and after that the English-only ones. I did not realise this structure at first, as it is explained in the last-but-one chapter, not in the first one as it should!
In general, the book seems to have been put together without too much attention to details. For example, the introduction to the book is very probably the very same for all languages in the series, and in a few instances they even forgot to change the name of the language treated in the book. For example, they wrote: "To be able to speak English well, you need to expose your ears to a lot of spoken Russian." Similarly, the audio recording explaining the structure of the book has passages of the type: "thank you for buying this book for learning RUSSIAN", with the word RUSSIAN being obviously copy-pasted into a canvas; i.e., they didn't even want to write or record separate introductions for each language. 
The sound quality of the audio also could be better. It's definitely sufficient, but it not as good as I'd expect from a professional product. The recordings are at 22kHz, adequate for voice recordings but not quite crystal clear and it does not add to the overall quality of the product.
Finally, I have to comment on the difficulty level. The book is advertised as "for complete beginners with little to no previous experience in learning Russian" but this is simply ridiculous. A complete beginner would need to make a herculean effort to go through this book. My level is upper-intermediate and this booklet is about right for me, I understood almost all of it on the first listen but in each chapter there are still about 10-15 words which I don't know or I'm not sure about. I think a true beginner would be completely lost: you need at the very least an A2 or, better, B1 or B2 level to profit from this book. 

Curiously, the English used in the translations and voice recordings is sometimes a little off, as if the text had been translated by a (competent) non-native speaker. The speaker is a woman with a rather posh English accent which sounds native, but she too sometimes sounds a little strange. As I'm interested in the Russian, however, this really does not matter.

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2 people found this helpful

No vocabulary

Going through a dictionary to find the meaning of words would be too time consuming otherwise the stories are really very good for an intermediate student. This book is not for beginners .Other stories in some books have a vocabulary. which I think is essential.

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Amazing guide for everyone

The short stories are funny and the vocabulary level is perfect for an intermediate speaker. Its highly recommend for beginners or intermediate level.

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