Becoming fluent in a language takes more than just memorization. Each learned rule and vocabulary word has to start coming naturally, without requiring a mental effort. The only way to achieve this fluent stage is practice. This is exactly what this book will provide for you.
The Everything® Russian Practice Book offers you over 250 exercises to perfect your Russian. It is divided into convenient parts; each of them is devoted to a grammatical topic. Exercises range from simple ones—allowing you to review the basics of the Russian language—to those that give you a chance to try your hand at complex grammatical issues. The most demanding aspects of Russian grammar, such as cases, noun-adjective agreement, and various types of verb conjugations, have more exercises devoted to them to ensure that the reader gets enough practice with these tricky subjects.
Besides enhancing your knowledge of grammar, the exercises in The Everything® Russian Practice Book can also help you to refresh and expand your Russian vocabulary. Each sentence in the exercises is a fine sample of real conversational Russian as it is spoken by educated speakers. The best way to boost your vocabulary is to translate every word, phrase, and sentence you encounter in the book. While only a few of the exercises include translation in the instructions, it is in your best interests to translate as many sentences as you can. Even if an exercise concentrates on practicing a specific grammatical point, translating the sentences will help you grip the way this grammatical point plays into the context, and provide you with yet another chance to master your understanding of Russian.
For your convenience, this book comes with a short dictionary at the end, which should help you with the most common words and expressions. However, the exercises in The Everything® Russian Practice Book cover a wide vocabulary spectrum. If you want to benefit fully from the richness of Russian offered in this book, you need to use a big Russian-English dictionary. There are a number of decent dictionaries offered online. Enter “Russian-English online dictionary” in your search engine and browse through the results to find the dictionary you like.
As you have probably noticed, this book comes with an audio CD. This is a helpful feature, which favorably distinguishes The Everything® Russian Practice Book from many other Russian language books on the market. Listening to the audio components of the exercises will help you improve your listening comprehension, and will get you used to the sound of spoken Russian. Don't hesitate to listen to these tracks over and over. Even if at first all you hear is an incoherent mass of sounds, after a while you will start distinguishing words and phrases. Before you know it, Russian will sound familiar and understandable. Don't stop there. Go on listening to pick up the speaker's intonations and peculiarities of pronunciation. The best way to learn to speak the language is being exposed to its sounds.
And no matter what stage you are at, do not be afraid to take your language learning out into the world. Practicing your Russian in daily situations will not only set your grammar and vocabulary in stone, but will also bring you the satisfaction of knowing that you can function in the language. So, go for it and find a Russian neighborhood in the city nearest to you and start speaking! You may even find new friends this way. Good luck in your exploration of Russian, and in whatever ways you will choose to use your knowledge afterwards!