Quick Reviews Pimsleur, Penguin, etc...

Hi, I started to learn 8 month ago Russian. I hope this review from a beginners point of view will be useful for other people, who are just starting to lear Russian. I have this Pimsleur course, but I don't like it so much. The reason therefore is that does not really teach you the grammatical rules or the rules for pronunciation.
So, at best you will just be able to reproduce the phrases that the people there are saying. What I liked better was this Penguin "Russian Course -- A Complete Course for Beginners". This book covers all the basic grammar and explains the rules very clearly. In this book they also explain the basic rules for pronunciation, but that is a bit hidden :). What I think that could be better in this book is the vocabulary. The new words that are introduced at the end of the lessons stand in no meaningful relationship (like table, chair, sit, bed, sleep, knife, cut and so on...). If there is no relation between the words it is much harder to memorize them. So for this purpose I used a vocabulary builder that has the words organized in such a way. But this book is in German, so I do not mention it here, but it worked well by the way :). To learn pronunciation I liked best this "Pronounce It Perfectly in Russian" by Beyer. It is a Book + 2 audio cassettes (what are they thinking, ahh :) ). Well, these cassettes are a bit 'old fashioned' ,to put it nicely... but after I converted them to mp3 everything was fine... In the lessons, one is taught with diagrams and examples how to produce the sounds. For example, when I just started I had some problems with this ы sound. I could hear it, but I did not know how people were doing it. With the help of the information in this book it suddenly became easy. They show you the correct position of the tongue in your mouth and then... let there be ы :). Some other pronunciation features explained include devoicing of voiced consonants the end of words, devoicing before certain consonants, how to pronounce 'е' and 'я' in stressed and unstressed positions and so on and so on... They also explain the soft consonants very well and the rules when a consonants becomes soft. This is much better than this pimsleur I think, because with pimsleur you might be able to reproduce all this, but only with the words and phrases they tell you. If you know the rules it is possible to do it with unknown words too. Ok, ok... I hope this is helpful...