  | First Thousand Words in Russian (Picture Word Books)
| ||||||||||
| |
Average user rating:  | |
| two major shortcomings | |
| As a beginning student of Russian I thought this book might be a good vocabulary builder, and for the most part that is true. The illustrations aren't always sufficient to identify the word depicted, but there is an English translation in the back so that's only a minor annoyance. Another minor annoyance is that words are given in either singular or plural form, whereas it would have been nice if both were included. However, I found two major shortcomings relating to pronunciation. One that has been mentioned in the other reviews is the lack of anything indicating stress, which could easily have been done with either accent marks on the word itself or by capitalizing the accented syllable in the phonetic rendering (PEESma). The other major shortcoming is that certain vagaries of pronunciation aren't taken into account, such as the devoicing of a consonant at the end of a word (e.g. the word for iron would be more correctly rendered as "ootyook" rather than "ootyoog") and the assimilation of consonants when they occur together ("foodbol" rather than "footbol"). I still would recommend this book but I also recommend getting a good dictionary that shows word stress and making sure you learn the rules of pronunciation and take them into account. | |
 Excellent book for adoptive parents of Russian children! | |
| This picture book was great because we could look at it together with our Russian son. He helped us pronounce the words in Russian as we taught him the words in English. I highly recommend it for parents going to Russia to adopt. Very comprehensive. Great illustrations. (I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 only because it was lacking accents in the pronunciation guide; hence I didn't know which syllable to accent for best pronunciation. I would recommend that the next edition show which syllable is accented; then it would certainly merit 5 stars!) | |
 I Didn't Buy the Book Because... | |
| ...the words are not stressed. For beginners who don't have a native Russian speaker around to pronounce the words for them, it is absolutely essential that each word show the vowel that is stressed. Normally, in textbooks for beginning Russian students, this is done by placing a stress mark over the stressed vowel. Unfortunately, this book does not do that. Like English, Russian words are pronounced quite differently depending on the placement of the primary stress. The reader of this book will not know, for example, how the word "aftobus" ("bus" in English) should be pronounced: AHf-to-boos, ahf-TO-boos, or ahf-to-BOOS. The correct pronunciation is ahf-TO-boos. No doubt most American speakers, analogizing from "automobile" (AW-tuh-muh-beel), would pronounce it AHf-to-boos. And is the word for "watch" pronounced "CHAH-see" or "chih-SEE"? The latter is closer to the correct pronunciation. But without a sress mark to show this, how is one to know? In addition, in conversation most speakers of Russian nowadays pronounce the consonant "shch" not as sh + ch (as in "freSH CHeese"), but as a fronted "shsh" (as in "I wiSH SHe wouldn't do that"). Although the concept of the dictionary is good, because of the lack of stress marks I don't think it's worth buying. | |
People who bought First Thousand Words in Russian (Picture Word Books) also bought ... | |
