Schaum's Outline of Russian Vocabulary

Schaum's Outline of Russian Vocabulary would be useful to a student during the very earliest introduction to Russian. This book's material is duplicated in other introductions to the language. An advantage of these outlines is the large number of excersises for practice, all with answers.

I bought this book after purchasing the truly stellar "Schaum's Outline of Russian Grammar" expecting this to be of the same quality. The book *is* useful and *does* have a lot of information packed in there, and the organizational structure does have some good ideas that make the exercises (which are good) hang together well. I have two main problems with the book beyond this. First, you are absolutely sand blasted with vocab. This may be good or bad, depending on your point of view, but I found it to mostly be bad, because it wasn't designed with absorption/acquisition in mind. I think this would be a great review or refresher for someone who was already very advanced with both grammar and vocabulary. Not so much for somebody trying to build up to that point.

The bigger problem is that unlike the Grammar Outline, or basically any other Russian course on the market, the vocabulary is presented without any accent marks. I can't imagine why they did this, since a word's stress is so critical to developing proper Russian pronunciation (much more so than for say, English or Spanish). Especially since stress shifts in case endings or verb conjugations can lead to hilarious or tragic misunderstandings or no understanding at all, this decision just doesn't make any sense to me.

Schaum's "Russian Vocabulary." This is supposed to a text in vocabulary building for everyday situations. However, the authors/publisher really missed the proverbial boat: There are no accent marks for any of the words in this book! The book title should be "We'll Show You What the Words Look Like in Print, But We Won't Tell You How to Pronounce Them Correctly." Any student of Russian knows how unpredictable the stress of Russian words is. It's really a rather nasty little joke to sell you a vocabulary book without the accent marks. You would have to look each word up in a dictionary to find out how to say it -- an impossible task. Ironically, accent marks are included in Schaum's Russian Grammar book. In short, this book is totally useless for learning new vocabulary unless you want to risk putting the accent on the wrong syllable (and perhaps totally changing the meaning of the word). What were they thinking!