Over the years, I have taken a few Russian courses and used many different study guides/tools to help learn the language. Obviously, one will never become fluent in a language after listening to one cd, but this particular disc is a good one to listen to for a quick introduction. It is always interesting to hear what one person considers to be the most important parts of the language, but there are no major surprises on this cd. For some reason, Russian seems to be more popular (at least for sources like this) in England than in the US, so there is a bit of British English to American English that must be done, but nothing major. Overall, this is a quality effort and I'd be interested in more training materials from Mr. Bollinger. ( )

(Early Reviewer Book) If you're going to be vacationing or doing business in Russia, and need an aid to memorizing a few simple, everyday phrases, you could do worse than this CD. Since I don't know any Russian, I'm not competent to say whether you could do better, but you could do worse. I'd recommend using this as a supplementary tool in conjunction with a written guidebook or language self-study course. ( )

I already know a bit of Russian, but I'm incredibly rusty. This cd helped me brush up. Their examples were good, and they were voiced very clearly. I'm not certain if this would be as helpful for someone who has no experience with Russian, but it was good enough for my purposes.

I loaded this audio into my blackberry before flying to Moscow on business and it turned out to be very useful and a lot of fun too. My flight got delayed and I had time to go through the tracks several times in the airport. I actually expected a typical boring language course, but this one is fairly entertaining. It explains some cultural stuff and common words that exist in both English and Russian. Learning numbers, food, drink and shopping does help as most Russians don’t speak English at all. ( )

Writing a review of a language course is a delicate task. Asking whether this CD achieves its goal of teaching you Russian sort of depends on how you define the goal. As a general introduction to Russian, it's a miserable failure. But that doesn't mean that it is of no use. I can see two categories of users who might find this CD useful. The first is someone who wants to pick up just enough Russian to greet a prospective business associate, or handle a simple situation on a business trip to Russia. You'll never be able to hold a real conversation after studying this CD alone. Furthermore, since it's completely audio based, you'll learn nothing about the written language, so reading signs to navigate a Russian city is completely out of the question.

The other potential user who might benefit from this CD would be someone who is trying to refresh or brush up on forgotten skills. If you studied Russian in college in the dim ages of your youth, this would probably help you to resurrect those dusty, dessicated neurons which still house useful knowledge. ( )