Nachalo, Vol. 1

So far I have only gone through the first chapter because I am taking a course that is not intensive. The book is fine if you need to learn everything from scratch, like the alphabet. Definitely you will need some lessons too in order to be guided through the book. Even though the order is logical and it has a story, you can fall in errors that only a teacher can correct early on. [...] Overall good asset if you are into learning the language and committing to it.

My class has been using the Nachalo series for two years now, and have also tried other russian study books as supplimentary information. While some other books had better exercises, the Nachalo series had much better discriptions and much more vocabulary. overall, we came to the conclusion that the Nachalo series is one of the best language learning series we have encountered.

I think this book is pretty good at teaching a student Russian, as long as the student has a fluent speaker teaching the material.