Viewing topic: Russian online courses

I have started using Mango's free online course. It is a drill-based course with a lot of repetition. It has a hundred lessons of about 75-125 slides (audio-visual) each. Each lesson after the first begins with a review. It also includes grammatical explanations with-in the lessons. Each lesson takes less than half an hour unless you feel you have to repeat a lot (with the each repeat and back buttons). The speakers have pleasant voices, but the Russian speakers only speak at normal conversational only. The content is getting-around in Russia conversations (greetings, shopping, drug-store, etc.).

One thing I especially like is that it is well organized and easy to navigate in.

I guess for some people Mango can be useful. I didn't care for it. I got a lot more out of this site: http://www.learnrussianfree.com/vocabulary.aspx

For more in-depth grammar work, try here: http://www.learnrussianfree.com/vocabulary.aspx

Recently I've been studying 'The Russian Verb' by R. Bivon and E. Petrukhina. While I don't really care for some of their methodology regarding the way they classify verbs, the sections on prefixes and prepositions is extremely informative. One should have a decent grasp on basic Russian grammar before attempting this book.

Udachi!

In St. Petersburg?

Those addresses as clickable links for anyone too lazy to copy-and-paste:

http://www.trymango.com
http://www.learnrussianfree.com/vocabulary.aspx

Phil, you surely know who R. Bvion is, right? One of my least favourite Russia-related characters, in close cahoots with the infamous Benedict School!

Of course I know about Bivon... and we feel the same way about the B-school. That said I still like parts of the the book. Of course I did get it for free. If I had actually had to pay for it I probably wouldn't like it so much.

Now "The Idiot's guide to learing Russian".... That's a book worth every penny, kopeck or pence. The author not only makes the grammar understandable... he also makes it...FUN!