I use this book/CD set in a beginning conversation class at City College of San Francisco and have found it to be practical, engaging, and quite challenging for the students. We cover the material in detail and I supplement it with many exercises, which are necessary for developing fluency, but the book itself is outstanding, at least when used in a class context. After the first semester, several of my beginning students went to Russia and were able to identify important signs, ask for a few food items in a restaurant, express a few desires and hope to understand some basic responses to their questions. Situations and expressions given in the book allow students to enjoy role-playing while learning essential constructions. I was amazed at how much they managed to accomplish by the end of the year.
For a student studying alone, the program is quite challenging, but worth trying. The booklet, however, fell apart almost immediately. Both my students and I have resorted to photocopying and sometimes enlarging individual pages of the text, as we used them intensively. |
Oxford Take Off in Russian: 4 CDs (Take Off In...) Books In Print, Audio Books.