Whether you're learning alone or attending classes, you'll find this complete Russian language course for beginners both accessible and indispensable. Designed to provide the student with an excellent command of basic Russian (the equivalent of A' level standard) the 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. The book also includes a vocabulary of 1,500 words and a glossary of grammatical terms.

The New Penguin Russian CourseIntroduction Acknowledgments 1. Learning to Read Russian Alphabet and Pronunciation; Transliteration; Street Signs

2. Russian Handwriting; More on Pronunciation

3. Everyday Phrases; Basic Grammar Naming Things; Basic Grammar; Gender; Map of Russia

4. Doing Things - Verbs; Personal Pronouns Present Tense; Conjugations; Word Stress; Nouns and Cases; Conversation in the Metro

5. Asking Questions; The Prepositional Case Indeclinable Nouns; Dialogues

6. Possession; Going Places; The Accusative Case Russian Personal Names; Dialogues

7. Describing Things: Adjectives Masculine, Feminine and Neuter Adjectives; "What kind of...?"; "This" and "That"; Prepositional and Accusative Cases of Adjectives; Adverbs; Moscow Street Map

8. Plurals; Spelling Rules; Buying Things Spelling Rule 1; "Is There...?"; Spelling Rule 2; Map of Europe

9. Numbers; The Genitive Case 1-5,000; Genitive Singular and Plural; Quantities; Roubles and Dollars; Buying Things; Street Market

10. "To Have"; More on the Genitive Genitive Pronouns; "There Isn't"; Prepositions Taking the Genitive; Genitive of Adjectives; "Whether"; Dialogues

11. The Past; Reflexive Verbs The Founding of St. Petersburg

12. The Future; Aspect; The Dative Case Imperfective and Perfective; "To Want"; Dative; "To Give"; "To Please"; Spelling Rules 3 and 4; Prepositional Plural; In the Restaurant; Visiting Friends

13. Aspect in the Past; Use of Tenses Aspect of the Infinitive; Reported Speech; More about "Whether"; Dialogue

14. Aspect in the Future; Impersonal Constructions Dialogue

15. Requests and the Imperative Summary of Aspect Use; Two Lost Tourists; Phoning a Bureaucrat

16. The Instrumental Case TOT and TÓT; Declension of Surnames; A Family at Home; Volodia and the KGB

17. Time, Date, Age; Ordinal Numbers Months; Years; The Daily Life of Chaikovskii (Tchaikovsky)

18. The Comparative; Superlatives; Relative Clauses with ("Who," "Which"); Victor Wants to Meet Mary; Siberian Superlatives; Map of Siberia

19. The Conditional; Obligation; Prefixes Mary Seeks an Absent-Minded Professor

20. Verbs of Motion: Going, Running, Bringing Travelling Around; Tania in Motion

21. Possession; Purpose Mr. Thornwaite Doesn't Like His Hotel; Was Turgenev a Revolutionary?

22. Fun with Numbers Declension of Numbers; "Both"; Collective Numerals; Fractions; Soviet Divorce Statistics

23. Time Expressions "When?"; "How Long?"; Vadim and Eva; Mr. Kuznetsov and Mr. Pope

24. Negation; Place of He Nothing, Nobody, Never; A Pineapple, but No Bananas

25. Diminutives; Proper Names; Politeness "The Fox and the Rolling-Pin"

26. Indefinite Pronouns; Word Order; Writing Letters A Letter to Mrs. Pope

27. Participles: Types and Stress A Classic Film

28. Verbal Adverbs Peter the Great; A Recipe for Mushroom Solianka

29. "Bookish" Style; Active Participles; Punctuation; Short-Form Adjectives Vladivostok; The Winter Palace

30. Abbreviations; Names of Russian Letters; Particles A Complete Chekhov Story; Fat and Thin

Grammatical Tables The Four Spelling Rules Russian-English Vocabulary English-Russian Vocabulary Key to Exercises and Translation of Texts Glossary of Grammatical Terms Index