Lovely little book

I loved this book - well chosen vocabulary for modern life and the stories are relatable as well - would be ok for school as well as adult learners I think . I agree level is about A1A2 - but because of the dual language and vocabulary sections you could use it from beginner . One reviewer found the juxtaposition of the two languages a distraction - but I felt it helped - I quickly learn to zone out from the English if I don’t need it - or try to recall the Russian phrases/ words during this part if I am more actively learning. I think if you don’t need the English at all you are probably ready for a higher level ! The narrators voice is soft but the pace is even and I found the pronunciation very clear.

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very hard to listen to

The narrator is literally whispering and her pronunciation is very unclear, couldn't keep listening to the book.

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Great stories but not needed English

Firstly I will start by saying that I have listened to only the first story so far, and I can say that the story is very good (I have a lot of other Russian story books to compare it to) I would say it’s around an A2 level and easier to read and understand than some other books that are (incorrectly) advertised as for A1-A2 beginners. I am sure that the other stories are equally as good, however there is one disadvantage that I will go into later below.

I have bought the audible version or this, the physical book (awaiting delivery from Amazon this week) and the kindle version (as was priced reasonably) the kindle book has a paragraph of Russian followed by a Paragraph of English. I hope the printed book is one page Russian and the other page English, rather than translations every paragraph as it would make it easy to read, especially as ones Russian improves and then they wish to only read the Russian part of the story without wanting/needing the Russian. I often re-read lower level stuff to reinforce and don’t require the English.

The annoyance of having the language change every paragraph is bearable in the ebook l, it could even be added that it is useful for beginners. (Though I still maintain the opinion that a page for Russian followed by a page of English, would be better, as if it’s broken into paragraph on different pages still easy to like you the stories or just read in a single language of the reader prefers, so I hope that is how the printed book it)

However, the problem with the audible audio version is that they continue this same alternating paragraph English/Russian pattern. Which I can not understand at all. It’s not possible for a beginner to year a paragraph of Russian, remember it all word from word and then hear the English version and be able to translate each sentence. It also unnecessarily doubles the audio. I want to hear just the Russian audio as that is the language I am learning if I want to translate paragraphs then that is what the translation in the book is for. If the author wanted to include English I feel that they should have clearly separated it in the audible chapters so it has one chapter of Russian and then a completely separate English chapter, that way the book could also be used for reverse learning I.e. Learning English from Russian.

Having listened to the first story once, I now want to re hear several times in Russian before re-reading that story in the book. This is how a lot of people learn a language through books, but with this particular book the listening is forced to re-listen to the English audio also. This is annoying as the audio for the first story is about 50 mins! So it’s such a waste of time to listen to the whole thing. If lessons were broken into only Russian, or completely desperate tracks for English. Then a learner/listening could be more productive and would ultimately learn Russian quicker. I hope that they consider this when/if releasing more books. If they fix this issue (which I believe is an oversight as if you look at a lot of other books for learning Russian the standard option is to leave out the English from the audio in it’s entirety which makes complete sense as a learner of Russian) then this book would easily be 5*

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4 people found this helpful