2001 Russian and English Idioms

A friend showed me this book when I was in Yekaterinburg, Russia. I flipped through it, and the first thing that came into my mind was that this book was probably a cute collection of homely archaic sayings which nobody really uses. There was a Russian girl standing next to me, so I tried a couple of these idioms out on her and asked her if people really used them. She nodded and said yes and gave me a look that made me realize what an ignorant foreigner I was. My wife is Russian, and I often ask her about the idioms in this book. Every once in a while she'll tell me that a certain idiom sounds weird or that people don't really say it, but the vast majority of the idioms in this book are bona fide Russian expressions which make perfect sense to native russians. My wife's advice was that foreigners shouldn't use these idioms in an obnoxious way in order to be funny or draw attention to themselves, but to learn them well enough to use them naturally in speech, and that this would really help them to sound like legitimate speakers of Russian.In other words, this book is an excellent reference which is filled with genuine Russian colloquialisms that you won't generally find in standard Russian-English dictionaries. Another thing I like about this book is that it isn't filled with trashy vulgar expressions, like some other books which claim to teach "real Russian." The compiler of this reference did an excellent job.One thing that I like about this book is that there are two sections, Russian-English and English-Russian, so you can not only look up the meanings of Russian idioms, but you can see how to express many English idioms into Russian. Another helpful feature of this book is an appendix at the back which shows what various common abbreviations stand for.If you want to enrich your knowledge of the Russian language as Russians actually speak it, without having to study a bunch of offensive slang, then this book is what you're looking for.