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A review by kasss
Short Stories in Russian for Beginners by Olly Richards
4.0
3.5 stars.
I don't consider myself an absolute beginner in Russian any more. I've had classes for 2,5 years and am at a solid A2 level(honestly could be higher by now, getting my ass in gear to finally reach B this year). On the whole, the level of this book was just fine for me, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone below level A2. More suitable for high beginners/low intermediate.
Grammatically it was easy and I didn't run into any problems, but the vocabulary was occasionally challenging. The book has vocabulary lists but curious choices were made on which words to include in the list and which to... I don't know? Ignore? Assume people know them? Make people skip over them (not a bad technique)? The stories used quite a lot of vocab (especially verbs) that I wouldn't immediately expect someone of my level to understand, but then it added words like плакать, подарок, спокойно, новости etc to the vocab lists.
Talking about the vocab lists: there were quite a few words in the text that were underlined but that never showed up in the lists. A little sloppy. Also quite a few words that showed up in multiple stories (and multiple times within a story) and were listed every single time. We get it, улыбнуться means "to smile" and people in these stories smile a lot - I'd expect a reader to pick it up after one story.
As for the stories, they were enjoyable. Not too complicated, but then that's not what I expect from a book aimed at not-quite-beginners. I didn't care about the first two stories that much and found them a bit tiresome/boring, but thankfully it picked up after that. That's just my personal preference though - the book covers several genres.
On the whole, reading this book was a nice experience. I read a chapter a day (on most days) at first, but noticed I soon got better and faster at reading and started reading entire stories (3 chapters) in one sitting. Very satisfying to finish a book (which is exactly what Richards and Rawlings stated as their goal in the introduction, so good job!).
I don't consider myself an absolute beginner in Russian any more. I've had classes for 2,5 years and am at a solid A2 level
Grammatically it was easy and I didn't run into any problems, but the vocabulary was occasionally challenging. The book has vocabulary lists but curious choices were made on which words to include in the list and which to... I don't know? Ignore? Assume people know them? Make people skip over them (not a bad technique)? The stories used quite a lot of vocab (especially verbs) that I wouldn't immediately expect someone of my level to understand, but then it added words like плакать, подарок, спокойно, новости etc to the vocab lists.
Talking about the vocab lists: there were quite a few words in the text that were underlined but that never showed up in the lists. A little sloppy. Also quite a few words that showed up in multiple stories (and multiple times within a story) and were listed every single time. We get it, улыбнуться means "to smile" and people in these stories smile a lot - I'd expect a reader to pick it up after one story.
As for the stories, they were enjoyable. Not too complicated, but then that's not what I expect from a book aimed at not-quite-beginners. I didn't care about the first two stories that much and found them a bit tiresome/boring, but thankfully it picked up after that. That's just my personal preference though - the book covers several genres.
On the whole, reading this book was a nice experience. I read a chapter a day (on most days) at first, but noticed I soon got better and faster at reading and started reading entire stories (3 chapters) in one sitting. Very satisfying to finish a book (which is exactly what Richards and Rawlings stated as their goal in the introduction, so good job!).