The New Penguin Russian Course

An accessible and complete Russian language course for beginners

Designed to provide an excellent command of basic Russian, this book features thirty lessons punctuated by revision exercises to ensure you have fully understood what you have learned. The emphasis is on acquiring vocabulary, experiencing conversational language and learning useful grammar.

This essential guide includes:

• An answer key to all exercises

• English translations of all the Russian texts

• More than 1,500 vocabulary words

• Common expressions and full explanations of essential grammar

• A glossary of grammatical terms

Table of Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

1. Learning To Read Russian

2. Russian Handwriting: More On Pronunciation

3. Everyday Phrases; Basic Grammar

4. Doing Things – Verbs; Personal Pronouns

PLATE: Map of Russia

5. Asking Questions; The Prepositional Case

6. Possession; Going Places; The Accusative Case

7. Describing Things: Adjectives

PLATE: Map of Moscow City Centre

8. Plurals; Spelling Rules; Buying Things

PLATE: Map of Europe

9. Numbers; The Genitive Case

10. ‘To Have’; More On The Genitive

11. The Past; Reflexive Verbs

12. The Future; Aspect; The Dative Case

13. Aspect In The Past; Use Of Tenses

14. Aspect In The Future; Impersonal Constructions

15. Requests And The Imperative

16. The Instrumental Case

17. Time, Date, Age; Ordinal Numbers

18. The Comparative; Superlatives; Relative Clauses with ؟

PLATE: Map of Siberia

19. The Conditional; Obligation (؟); Prefixes

20. Verbs Of Motion: Going, Running, Bringing

21. Possession (؟); Purpose ((؟)

22. Fun With Numbers

23. Time Expressions

24. Negation; Place of _HE_

25. Diminutives; Proper Names; Politeness

26. Indefinite Pronouns; Word Order; Writing Letters

27. Participles: Types And Stress

28. Verbal Adverbs

29. ‘Bookish’ Style; Active Participles; Punctuation; Short-Form Adjectives

30. Abbreviations; Names Of Russian Letters; Particles

Grammatical Tables

The Four Spelling Rules

Russian-English Vocabulary

English-Russian Vocabulary

Key to Exercises And Translation Of Texts

Glossary Of Grammatical Terms