Thread: learning russian

hi!
i have no knowledge of russian, but i'd like to learn. that is why i joined this forum. could someone tell me the best way to learn russian? im a high school student, and i dont have the money to buy rosetta stone or fly to russia readily available. are there any recommended books or textbooks?
thanks!

FreeLanguageCourses.com

You can download the Princeton Russian course here.

Rosetta Stone maybe. Try looking up Basic Russian, then once you got the pronouncing part done, buy a course.

don't even waste your money on Rosetta Stone. It does not work like it says it does. The worst part is it doesn't teach you about grammar, or even the alphabet. So as a beginner with Rosetta Stone, you have to spend so much time through tests that you will fail, and vocabulary is even harder to get with on Rosetta Stone.

Here are two sites I find useful:
russianforeveryone.com (You must try this one, it's wonderful)
russianlessons.com
and of course, masterrussian.com

sometimes I use wiktionary to look up words, especially useful when you are confused about how a verb would form correctly.

There are a lot of typos in This version of Prinston Russian course. But in general the course is very good because it teaches the correct Russian. It's difficult to find any mistakes.

I forgot to mention the Colloquial Russian textbook:
Amazon.com: Colloquial Russian: The Complete Course For Beginners (Colloquial Series) (9780415469951): Svetlana le Fleming, Susan E. Kay: Books

You can also order it from Barnes & Noble. (that's how I got mine.)

This is one I used as a beginner, and it's pretty good. And by the way, for memorizing words listening to Russian music and translating lyrics has helped me a lot to memorize vocabulary. Good luck

I've tried some books of russian over 1,5 years, and the best one I've found so far is called "The New Russian Penguin Course". Now I'm at the lesson 22, and I love it!