Product Reviews

This is one of a series of products in the Rosetta Stone range from Europress, which covers a number of different languages. Other titles in the series include English, French, German and Spanish.

The Russian language requires you to learn not only vocabulary and grammar but also an unfamiliar script. This program installs Cyrillic as a font on your hard drive and then provides you with a graded series of exercises which cover

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not only recognition of the sounds of Russian words, but also of the written script.

The program provides a range of exercises, designed to progressively stretch your capabilities. These help you to recognise words by asking you to choose match the words with a multiple-choice selection of pictures.

In addition, this program gives you the option to listen to the words as they're spoken and then repeat them, if you have a microphone, to improve your pronunciation.

There is also a keyboarding facility which allows you to practise typing words in Cyrillic. The keyboard mappings for languages that use non-Roman scripts is very different, and it takes a while to get used to finding keys for letters that look superficially similar to our own.

Rosetta Stone: Russian doesn't teach you to speak fluent Russian (and nor does it profess to), but it's a well thought out program with easy navigation and simple installation. Students will find it a useful supplement to a comprehensive language course.