The New Penguin Russian Course

Table Of Contents

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