Thread: Learning Material Russian - English

these extracts are from some works by L.Tolstoy, aren't they? Perhaps they can be useful if you're going to read his novels in original, but it will be very difficult to learn by them how to speak and write modern Russian, I think.
PS Personally, I've never liked Tolstoy's style....

Originally Posted by Malinka

these extracts are from some works by L.Tolstoy, aren't they?

Yes, both are from "Севастопольские рассказы" by Tolstoy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastopol_Sketches - written more than 150 years ago!). Tolstoy's language is rather ponderous, and some of the expressions he used (like "играть на мелок") hardly anybody understands now.
Dialogs are funny, but they also use "old" texts.

It really put me off AssimiI's courses - I was going to use one of them, but now I can't trust their choice of learning material.

Originally Posted by deker

Тяжеловатый язык. Своеобразный.

I'd say it's incomprehensible scrappy lines with mistakes.
Are not there better things?
I study english without any courses. Just read and listen to that is interesting to me.

Yeah, but you are forgetting one thing; Russian is MUCH more complicated than English. Any muppet can learn English (I did, for example...) and it's true that no special material is really needed... But learning Russian on the other hand is more like an art....

Learning English compared with learning Russian is like boiling an egg, compared with cooking a cordon bleu style three course dinner....

For that reason finding "the best" learning material for Russian, is a bit like the quest for the holy grail.... everyone is speculating about what is the best. Assimil is generally considered better than Pimsleur which is the most commonly used course.

The place where this was listed is a website called "How to learn any language", dedicated to language studies. They were mentioning that there is another Assmil Russian course from 1973 which is better. But that's from French to Russian, so because the people on that site are native English speakers mostly, they recommended this course from 1951. I thought it must be really awesome, so I was very keen to find it.

I agree that it looks a bit outdated. It seems everyone thinks it's appalling, so I'll pass on it..

I just got carried away when I looked for it and found out that Assimil had threatened the site which referenced it, to take down its' links. Then I decided that I really wanted the course. But I've got other books, don't really need this one.