5000 Russian Words: With All Their Inflected Forms and Other Grammatical Information : A Russian-English Dictionary With an English-Russian Word Ind

I bought this book and am returning it. It is killed by its formatting - or total lack thereof. It looks like pages upon pages of words and their declensions were printed up in an Excel spreadsheet and photocopied. No layout whatsoever. None. It's all but unreadable and unusable because of it.

I believe the previous review is too critical of this text. Of the other Russian books of this type with which I'm familiar (501 Russian Verbs, Big Silver Book of Russian Verbs), none approach the amount of material in 5000 Russian Words. Simply stated, it has virtually every verb in these books, plus many more verbs and non-verbs. Almost every inch of each page is covered with text. It is NOT a dictionary, but it does have most words you're likely to use (for everything else, pick up the Katzner dictionary). It may not be perfect, but it's the best book of its kind.

Also, I would argue geographical terms such as the names of US states are important conversational components. As someone about to move to a Russian speaking country, I imagine knowing the correct spelling and use of my home state is going to be useful in explaining where I come from.

This is simply the most important reference work in Russian - along with a good reference grammar and a good English-Russian-English dictionary (Kenneth Katzner is best for American words, but it's best, I've found to buy him PLUS Oxford) - that you will ever possess. You MUST have it. Buy it NOW. I've started to peddle these around our Russian students and am getting people to bite quite a bit on it. I have never NOT found a word I've looked up in it, along with full conjugation and correspending perfective/imperfective verg(if verb). Same with nouns. I get full inflection, with sometimes other information.

If you are a Russian student, this and the Kenneth Katzner dictionary are the best $60 you can spend. I've had this book for 11 years and rely on it when writing formally in Russian. Worth every penny.

I remember my own copy from 13 years ago quite well. One of the most entertaining aspects of this inflection/conjugation guide is that you can open it up to the basic form of any of the vocabulary words, wave the book, pages spread, in a non-Russian-speaker's face, and then proceed through 3 more full pages of inflacted forms, bragging "these are all forms of the same word."

Ideas like case inflection, grammatical gender, and verbal aspect (just to start) are pretty much alien to a native English speaker, this book proves an invaluable guide in the beginning years of study.

I only docked it one star due to the incredibly poor production values of Slavica Publications at the time when this text was published.