The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners

by Nicholas J. Brown

Overview

An accessible and complete Russian language course for beginners

Designed to provide an excellent command of basic Russian, this 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.

This essential guide includes:
• An answer key to all exercises
• English translations of all the Russian texts
• More than 1,500 vocabulary words
• Common expressions and full explanations of essential grammar
• A glossary of grammatical terms

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140120417
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/01/1996
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	5.02(w) x 7.74(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

The New Penguin Russian CourseIntroduction
Acknowledgments
1. Learning to Read Russian
Alphabet 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