Max Bollinger

There aren't very many audio resources (at least not stocked on the shelves of your local Barnes and Noble) in Russian, and this second volume is, like the first, a valuable resource for anyone trying to learn the language.

I'm not sure if all copies are packaged this way, but mine came with quite a lot of written material on learning Russian as well that was very helpful. On its own merits, though, I'm not sure that you could learn Russian only with the aid of the CDs, though that may not show more be what Bollinger is going for. At the beginning of this one, he states that he wants you to learn Russian like a native, and I think he succeeds in that - when I learned English as a child, no one sat me down and said, "This is English, and here's how we're going to sequentially learn it." Instead, you learn new words as the need arises, in life, which is a lot like what happened as I listened to the CD. But this hopping around-approach is a little disconcerting to the casual listener. We may start learning about how Russians view Shakespeare, segue into something like how to say "oil and gas company", and end up with Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy.

On the other hand, I do feel that the CD has a real strength - it teaches you a lot about Russian culture and heritage. You learn about the aforementioned Russian approach to Shakespeare, about patronymics (Russian middle names that indicate a person's parentage), saints' days and many other things that may be unfamiliar to an American or other native English speaker. And with such an eclectic approach to the language- when you do get to Russia, many of the words will probably be at least a little familiar. I would certainly buy this, if I were trying to learn Russian, but you will also need a good dictionary, and something a little more like a textbook wouldn't hurt (though, to be fair, Bollinger also mentions a number of helpful websites on the CD). show less

As someone who has never studied Russian before, I thought that I was probably the perfect candidate for this program - I am certainly an untrained English speaker. Here's what I discovered: If you would like to learn Russian, you may find books that will teach you how to speak it, and you may find things that will teach you how to read it, but never the twain shall meet. There is NOTHING, almost nothing, that will teach you how to both write and speak Russian and is easily obtainable from show more your public library interlibrary loan system, or indeed, anywhere, for less than $400 from Rosetta Stone.

That being said, I know quite a bit more Russian now that I have listened to this CD umpteen times. However, I found out that it was not enough to listen to it over and over. With nothing to visualize the words as I said them, the language flowed in one ear and out the other, leaving behind the tiniest trickle of knowledge. If I were to go to Russia a week after receiving this CD, all I could've said was "prevyet", "dos vedanya" and "taksi". ("Hello", "goodbye", and "taxi" to you.) Eventually, I decided that more action was needed, and sat down with the CD, taking down every word the speaker said in a kind of maniacal shorthand, and studying later to see if what I'd written made sense. It worked, for the most part.

Russian appears to be very similar to both French and German, a fact that is cleverly disguised by their sneaky tactic of having their own secret alphabet. Or perhaps our rude insistence on our own non-cyrillic alphabet, I don't know :) But speaking of the alphabet, the fact that the CD purports to teach you the Russian alphabet was frankly silly. If you don't have an alphabet written down anywhere to connect the sounds to, what good is learning a lot of unrelated sounds going to do you? None, that's what! However, it was an interesting foray into a new language, and after collecting lots of material, all the better to make a real study of Russian, it became apparent that spoken Russian materials are greatly needed. This makes a not-inconsequential addition to the field. show less

UPDATE: Okay, I was being kind of a dick in my original review about the fact that this is a CD and not a book and CDs are hard to use and I should calm down. I have managed to source a desktop with a disk drive, and I have to say that while I'm still not happy with the interface--so linear; if you're gonna do it CDwise as opposed to bookwise then why go whole hog and not do something online with an interface where I can skip to exactly what I want and click on a word or sound and hear it show more and see things grouped visually and etc.?

HOWEVER: In terms of the content, I like the approach a lot. There is a heavy focus on phonetic accuracy, which is obvs super important but which books can only touch indirectly and even a high number of sound-based language-learning media think it's good enough to just say things and let us figure it out and not walk us through it and that's not good enough; there is also a heavy focus on cultural things (he starts with patronymics, e.g., and there are passages from Chekhov and Shakespeare in Russian and you can hear the voice of Yuri Gagarin) and it seems to me there's no point in learning a language unless beyond learning how she is spoke, you also learn the shape of the world in which her speakers exist.

So in short there's a lot of interesting stuff here, and it's well worth a listen, although for me personally it wouldn't be the medium via which I'd choose to learn, simply because I'd prefer something with more flexibility. show less

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 show more 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. show less