Advanced Russian: From Reading to Speaking

Over the past decades, I've made out about 10,000 flash cards from reading (including the Internet). They exclude the words I've learned from the first 2 years of Russian (university classes). This book only covers a few percent of my word list. I compared this "statistic" with "Advanced Russian" 1987 from Slavica Publishers (same publisher). It turns out that the older book has even less of my word list, but it has more words. The reason for this is that this newer book doesn't contain many somewhat common words that should be covered in the first 2 years of college Russian. For example it's missing common names of animals, plants, household items, etc. There are no dogs, lions, cows, corn, vacuum cleaners, etc. So this book isn't much good for review of previous courses.I only looked at book 1. It only has 6 chapters of readings, 25 pages total. The older book had even less. This book has supplemental readings (in addition to the 25 pages) but the readings have no notes or glossary. Ordinary Russian readers often have both. There's a lot of colloquial stuff and slang and even a couple of vulgar words. It has a lot of multiple choice questions and matching of synonymous/ antonymous expressions etc. These take up a lot of space and are often too easy to work out (but are fun to do).The last 25 pages of the dictionary have bad headers printed at the tops of the pages. They should be in Cyrillic, but are printed Latin characters with diacritical marks, representing characters C0-FF from the old ISO-8859-1 8-bit character set (similar to Windows 1251 character set). It turns out that C0-FF are the Cyrillic characters for Windows Cyrillic, Code Page 1251. Wrong code page! But the text may have been encoded in Unicode which is based on the same sequences of characters as in the above mentioned code pages which implies (if it's 2-byte Unicode UTF-8) that the 3 (hexadecimal) digit prefixes of the codes for these letters are incorrect (only the last digit is correct)..I thought the first two lesson stories were poor and not at all interesting. The first story utterly fails to develop the characters in the story. You don't know their names, college majors, occupations or even have any idea what they look like. Yet you are asked in the exercises to discuss people you know almost nothing about. The lesson 2 story is unbelievable. A young man becomes assistant minister even though he hates his job. He loves history but take many years to read the history book that he loves. It makes no sense. The other 4 lessons are better. These readings are all from real Russian literature and contain some words that are not very common. The older book (of the same title) had stories written just for the book and thus its vocabulary was more useful.I was going to rate the book only 2 stars but since it's significantly better than the older book I mentioned, I'll give it 4. It should contain a note saying that to become proficient in Russian (which I'm not) one would need to go thru many more books like this one. I'm not anywhere near finished with the book and may write more about it later on.

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