--- product_id: 1210875 title: "The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners" price: "136.06 DT" currency: TND in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.tn/products/1210875-the-new-penguin-russian-course-a-complete-course-for-beginners store_origin: TN region: Tunisia --- # The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners **Price:** 136.06 DT **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners - **How much does it cost?** 136.06 DT with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.tn](https://www.desertcart.tn/products/1210875-the-new-penguin-russian-course-a-complete-course-for-beginners) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description An accessible and complete Russian language course for beginners Designed to provide an excellent command of basic Russian, this 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. This essential guide includes: • An answer key to all exercises • English translations of all the Russian texts • More than 1,500 vocabulary words • Common expressions and full explanations of essential grammar • A glossary of grammatical terms Review: Ideal for the independent learner - I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I've been learning Russian independently for about a year now, and I bought this book along with a college textbook being used at a local university. Amazingly, even though this book is far less expensive, I consider it superior to that textbook as well as other Russian textbooks I've seen. This book is great for the self-learner because it has many exercises and examples throughout, and everything is explained in a logical manner. Also, unlike most college textbooks, all of the solutions are in the back, so you can check and correct your answers (presumably you are buying this book to learn Russian and not to pass the class, so I'm sure there's little motivation to simply copy the answers to complete an assignment). The exercises directly relate to the associated lesson, and you'll be amazed at how much you'll learn after completing a lesson, as you'll be able to understand passages that were once unreadable to you. Be warned that the book is deceptively thin. You might look at the book, which is smaller than most textbooks, and figure that it's light on information. Trust me, it's not. Although on the outside it looks like a beach-read paperback novel that you'll be able to get through in a day or even a week, each page is packed with information, and you'll have to spend a lot of time on many lessons before these concepts sink in. Russian of course is a difficult language for a native English speaker, so don't expect to fly through this book. You shouldn't use this as your only resource if you are learning Russian. The biggest downside to this book is that it won't help your listening or your speaking (understandably, since it has no audio). You'll need to find another resource to work on these areas. Do not neglect this! I made the mistake of ignoring listening and speaking for the first few months, and I ran into an odd situation with a native speaker where I was able to read and write a few simply things in Russian but found it almost impossible to understand a single word or pronounce anything correctly (very embarrassing). In addition, you'll need to do a fair amount of studying and memorizing outside of the lessons. I found that I would learn words and grammar rules but then "forget" them after a few days or a few weeks. A lot of the grammar and declensions simply have to be drilled and memorized by brute force. Hey, nobody said Russian was easy. In short, this is an absolutely fantastic resource for a beginner who wants to learn to read and write in Russian. It is well worth the price. Get it, and you will not be disappointed. Udachi Vam! Review: User Friendly - I started Russian study from scratch at my local community college. Russian is tough, period. Our teacher (a Russian) wanted us to use this book. I found the progressive instruction well laid out and at several points you were allowed to "catch your breath." No, the book does NOT give complete detailed instruction of each case system with all the inflections, just the basics, and yes, complex case levels are somewhat split up , more complicated material later in the book. Russian has strict "comma rules" and of all of my five texts, this is the ONLY one that carefully describes these important rules, in ch. 26. Not even the Schaum grammar, which is massive, addresses comma rules. But here is a goody that is surprisingly overlooked: The Table of Contents and Index are the most thorough I have seen in this type of text, and the reader is referred to specific pages and/ or section of chapter, not just to some vague reference that leaves you thrashing through dozens of pages. There is an excellent Eng/RU dictionary, enough text and conversation material to be helpful, and nice grammatical tables although there are never enough of these. Changes since Russian political restructure can make bits of dialogue out of date but this is not an issue with me. I also use PIMSLEUR'S excellent CD system , and have used Complete Russian by West, and Colloquial Russian I and II, by Le Fleming and Kay; each has merits, but I keep using this Penguin book by Brown for reference and help - it is physically falling apart now! Finally, Excellent practical, friendly supplementary books are 501 VERBS, 5000 RUSSIAN WORDS, and Schaum's RUSSIAN GRAMMAR ( The latter book is scary but good reference, loaded with exercises) Finally, the RUSSIAN 750 VERBS by Zauber is superb, sort of a written Pimsleur, with about 3,000 sentences, easy to use, in English alpha. order, and with wonderful tables of prefixes and other goodies. All these books cheap. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #14,040 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #6 in Foreign Language Materials #11 in Word Lists #18 in Vocabulary Books | | Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 1,939 Reviews | ## Images ![The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81ia4eujoQL.jpg) ## Available Options This product comes in different **Format** options. ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Ideal for the independent learner *by S***D on May 30, 2010* I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I've been learning Russian independently for about a year now, and I bought this book along with a college textbook being used at a local university. Amazingly, even though this book is far less expensive, I consider it superior to that textbook as well as other Russian textbooks I've seen. This book is great for the self-learner because it has many exercises and examples throughout, and everything is explained in a logical manner. Also, unlike most college textbooks, all of the solutions are in the back, so you can check and correct your answers (presumably you are buying this book to learn Russian and not to pass the class, so I'm sure there's little motivation to simply copy the answers to complete an assignment). The exercises directly relate to the associated lesson, and you'll be amazed at how much you'll learn after completing a lesson, as you'll be able to understand passages that were once unreadable to you. Be warned that the book is deceptively thin. You might look at the book, which is smaller than most textbooks, and figure that it's light on information. Trust me, it's not. Although on the outside it looks like a beach-read paperback novel that you'll be able to get through in a day or even a week, each page is packed with information, and you'll have to spend a lot of time on many lessons before these concepts sink in. Russian of course is a difficult language for a native English speaker, so don't expect to fly through this book. You shouldn't use this as your only resource if you are learning Russian. The biggest downside to this book is that it won't help your listening or your speaking (understandably, since it has no audio). You'll need to find another resource to work on these areas. Do not neglect this! I made the mistake of ignoring listening and speaking for the first few months, and I ran into an odd situation with a native speaker where I was able to read and write a few simply things in Russian but found it almost impossible to understand a single word or pronounce anything correctly (very embarrassing). In addition, you'll need to do a fair amount of studying and memorizing outside of the lessons. I found that I would learn words and grammar rules but then "forget" them after a few days or a few weeks. A lot of the grammar and declensions simply have to be drilled and memorized by brute force. Hey, nobody said Russian was easy. In short, this is an absolutely fantastic resource for a beginner who wants to learn to read and write in Russian. It is well worth the price. Get it, and you will not be disappointed. Udachi Vam! ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ User Friendly *by S***E on December 23, 2012* I started Russian study from scratch at my local community college. Russian is tough, period. Our teacher (a Russian) wanted us to use this book. I found the progressive instruction well laid out and at several points you were allowed to "catch your breath." No, the book does NOT give complete detailed instruction of each case system with all the inflections, just the basics, and yes, complex case levels are somewhat split up , more complicated material later in the book. Russian has strict "comma rules" and of all of my five texts, this is the ONLY one that carefully describes these important rules, in ch. 26. Not even the Schaum grammar, which is massive, addresses comma rules. But here is a goody that is surprisingly overlooked: The Table of Contents and Index are the most thorough I have seen in this type of text, and the reader is referred to specific pages and/ or section of chapter, not just to some vague reference that leaves you thrashing through dozens of pages. There is an excellent Eng/RU dictionary, enough text and conversation material to be helpful, and nice grammatical tables although there are never enough of these. Changes since Russian political restructure can make bits of dialogue out of date but this is not an issue with me. I also use PIMSLEUR'S excellent CD system , and have used Complete Russian by West, and Colloquial Russian I and II, by Le Fleming and Kay; each has merits, but I keep using this Penguin book by Brown for reference and help - it is physically falling apart now! Finally, Excellent practical, friendly supplementary books are 501 VERBS, 5000 RUSSIAN WORDS, and Schaum's RUSSIAN GRAMMAR ( The latter book is scary but good reference, loaded with exercises) Finally, the RUSSIAN 750 VERBS by Zauber is superb, sort of a written Pimsleur, with about 3,000 sentences, easy to use, in English alpha. order, and with wonderful tables of prefixes and other goodies. All these books cheap. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ An excellent language learning book *by D***Y on December 30, 2008* If one is going to learn Russian--by which I mean learn it well enough to actually carry on an intelligent conversation--one must start with the grammar. Current products that promise easy, quick, learning of a language as difficult as Russian are simply marketing (expensive!)fantasy through huge advertising campaigns. I set about to learn Russian seriously, and this book was a good first step. I also got Kenneth Katzner's Dictionary, which is the absolute best in the world, and something I use daily. After a year's work, I bought an inexpensive Pimsleur audio disk, so I could hear what these words actually sounded like, and this package is doing the job for me. This book intelligently starts at the beginning, with the alphabet. It shows how letters are both printed and written in cursive, and then, from the 1st lesson, it begins to introduce the important grammatical principles underlying this extraordinarily difficult language. One quickly comes to appreciate how useless the exhorbitantly priced "interactive" programs are, which rely on the learning of many phrases. All they are is an electronic version of a phrase book. The person who has invested their hard earned money in such courses will realize, the first time they try to talk to a Russian, that they have squandered their money. In the first place, the words they have so carefully learned are virtually guaranteed to come back at them in a declined form, which, if they cannot recognize it, will sound like another word. How could they possibly commincate without knowing the accusative, genitive, dative, nominative, prepositional or instrumental case endings? A language like this is a serious undertaking (similar to classical Latin) and has to be approached with respect. Brown's "Russian Course" is a sensible, down-to-earth, traditional grammar, with exercises, readings, self-tests, vocabularies, and a really concise declension chart at the end which is ABSOLUTELY useful and necessary! Well worth the modest cost. Five star. No way to go wrong if you have a serious desire to learn this language. ## Frequently Bought Together - The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners - Russian Grammar QuickStudy Laminated Reference Guide (QuickStudy Academic) - Russian Grammar Made Easy: A Comprehensive Workbook To Learn Russian Grammar For Beginners (Audio Included) --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.tn/products/1210875-the-new-penguin-russian-course-a-complete-course-for-beginners](https://www.desertcart.tn/products/1210875-the-new-penguin-russian-course-a-complete-course-for-beginners) --- *Product available on Desertcart Tunisia* *Store origin: TN* *Last updated: 2026-06-06*