Student Book1, Russian Step By Step: School Edition Student, Workbook, Bilingual Edition

Very good book that has rules, and gives you a chance to practice writing.

Author Natasha Alexandrova has compiled a series of textbooks which rate among the most comprehensive, enriching, and well-organized that I have ever encountered throughout my lifetime learning experience with the Russian language. However, there are two different versions of the same books, i.e., one of which is a school edition, which causes much confusion. How different are the contents of both versions? The two editions for each level do not match.

TL;DR: If you must use this book, be sure you have a competent instructor to help you through it. If you plan to learn independently, then look for other books.While there were times when I wanted to like this book, I never felt that it was intuitive in arrangement or progression. This was the book that was assigned in my Russian night class; I can only guess because the owner of the school has ties with the editors/publishers of the book. I used to teach English abroad and all the books we used for the core of the lesson had to be from one specific publisher, even if they weren't the best tool.Our teacher also admitted several times that these books were not very good. If you are attempting to learn on your own, good luck, because there are many portions throughout the book that do not at all explain why there are changes in grammar, and when there are exceptions. You follow a pattern to the best of your ability, but upon checking your answers in the back of the book you find you may be wrong and there is little to no explanation as to why; hence having an instructor is paramount. Often there were exercises or self-tests that asked for language points that hadn't even been fully introduced yet.There are some tables and "to-the-point" explanations in the back of the book, but can be challenging to use. The instructor instructor also had the foresight to photocopy pages from other textbooks almost every class that were much more helpful and informative than that in the book. It helped to introduce some important grammar to us very early on in our lessons, because in the book a huge chunk of grammar is all given all at once, which was still overwhelming, despite having some preparation ahead of time.Depending on what you want to get out of Russian language learning, this book may not be right for you at all. There are several books that I've purchased that are simply useful and common phrases to learn if you are only travelling to Russia for a short amount of time, as opposed to learning bottom-up every bit of information.