Russian Short Stories for Beginners

Pour lire des textes accessibles, c’est très chouette. Le seul bémol selon moi c’est que pour la prononciation les accents ne sont pas indiqués. Il aurait été intéressant que la lettre accentuée soit en gras par exemple pour être sûr de prononcer correctement ce qu’on lit. A part ça, chouette achat

I thought this book would have Russian on one side and on the next page English. A lot of these kinds of books I have bought in French and Spanish were like this. If I had known it was only in Russian with an English summary, I would have bought the Kindle version. Other than that I think it's pretty standard for this genre, not much to say about it really. Edit 1: A year after purchase, my Russian has improved enough to write a review of this book. Overall, I think it's really good. I also bought the competitor's books by Olly Richards and the writing in both of them is really different. These Lingo Mastery books have more every day life themes, the stories are shorter, but you get more of them, and more vocabulary is translated at the end of the story than Olly RIchard's books. The stories kind of remind me of something a high school kid might write but that isn't a criticism, it's a book for language learners. I do have one criticism though, there was one story that was a bit ridiculous. It featured a mother of 3 who had apparently never spent a few hours apart from her children before and cried because they were gone for a few hours. I just don't think this is a healthy vision of motherhood. I did appreciate the woman focus of this story and the writing was fine but again overall, kind of an annoying message and I think they could have done better for a country that has more women in STEM than western countries. I thought about docking one star but decided it against it because the other stories were fine and some pretty cute. Also a lot of the stories are written from the first person of different people and there are several short biographies of various famous Russian people. I bought the Volume 2 and will continue reading. Reading is such a great way to improve language. Edit 2: I forgot that I wanted to say that everyone in this book gets tuberculosis.

Me encantó el libro, muy útil para principiantes.

Have been working through steadily. Is helping with learning the language

I finally cracked this open and it's exactly what I wanted. It's really lovely having some vocabulary in bolded text with translations right at the end of the chapter, it makes it so much easier than having to open a dictionary and bog myself down that way. The comprehension exercises at the end are short but reinforce the vocabulary, and when I read the summary given at the end of the story I was pleasantly surprised at how easily my comprehension flowed -- yet another vocabulary reinforcement. Once I've finished this one, I'll definitely be purchasing the Intermediate. The text does not have the stress marks, which are important to the language, but since non-learner Russian texts aren't written with stress marks I'm not inclined to dock a point for that. I have plenty of other resources to help me with pronunciation :)