Russian Blog
This is a blog by JustRussian about learning Russian. You will find useful tips for learning Russian, Russian courses available in London, information about Russian culture and links to websites with information for students of Russian.
Russian textbooks. Part 2
By Vlada 23 August 07
Are you about to take Russian lessons and do not know which course book to choose? Here is a little more of what you need to know.
In the previous part of the blog I talked about the two most widely used textbooks of Russian in the UK – Colloquial Russian and Ruslan. Now it’s time to mention some less popular but still well known ones.
Zhili-Byli, by L. Miller, L. Politova and I. Rybakova
This course book comes in two parts: Zhili-Byli 1: 28 Lessons of Russian for beginners, and Zhili-Byli 2: 12 lessons of Russian, basic level. It was published in St.Petersburg in 2000.
Zhili-Byli means “once upon a time”, it’s the traditional first line of children’s fairy-tales. Although the course is published in Russia, it is available in the UK (from Grant and Cutler or the net). I know that some of my colleagues like to use it. The thing about this course is that it is in Russian ONLY. No explanations or instructions in any other language but Russian, which totally rules it out as a self-study book. It requires a dedicated teacher who will make sure that all grammar points are understood and tasks are clear. To be fair, it is clearly structured and everything is explained with the help of examples and little tables for memorising but I (call me old-fashioned!) don’t really see the point of a textbook for complete beginners written entirely in the target language. I hate to think what my English would be like I had been taught it in English…
On a positive side, the course is supplemented by tapes and is full of quite jolly pictures that one can talk about – which stops it becoming boring (the characters in those pictures look a bit weird, but having published textbooks myself I know how impossible it is to find a good artist to produce illustrations for a book; they always come out either weird or scary!). So it’s a usable course but I wouldn’t use it myself.
Zhili-Byli 2 would be a good book to use for someone who has done Russian before but forgot a lot and needs to refresh their knowledge of the language, or for people with a Slavic mother tongue. It is in Russian only, but since it’s designed for upper-intermediate to advanced students, that’s totally justified. The book offers revision of all basic grammar in Russian and all the common vocabulary groups: shopping, food, health etc. It has good texts, and every unit has a short story by some Russian author at the end, for home reading. Some tasks are very interesting and include explaining idioms, describing pictures etc. I have used it myself, but it’s not a complete course, so it needs to be supplemented by additional grammar exercises and of course it requires teacher’s explanations of all the material. (unlike Colloquial Russian where everything is explained so well that any learner can take it and learn from the book, only asking the teacher to check their progress!). It wouldn’t be my first choice of a textbook but it would be good as a source of supplementary texts and exercises.