Roots of the Russian Language

I know the title of this book alone sounds so boring it could put a tweaker to sleep, like a homework assignment in some graduate course at an Ivy League Russian grammar symposium, but it's really interesting for those of us trying to learn Russian. This is the only book I have ever seen that finally organizes groups of words by their roots, enabling a student to see the connections between words and concepts and even a fascinating glimpse into Russian etymology, or the history of words and their development. I think this book is absolutely essential for anyone trying to study Russian. If you use it, it really will enable you to memorize whole goups of words much faster and help you guess at the meaning of words you don't know if you can pick out the roots of the unknown words. Since these are two of the biggest obstacles to learning Russian, you can see what a valuable book this is.

Many Russian textbooks are heavy-handed with grammar, and far too light on vocabulary. This is an excellent suppliment to any Russian course, or better yet, a way to improve your own wordpower in the Russian language. By building on common roots, wordpower is expanded rapidly, and the ability to understand words by identifying roots, just like is done in whatever your native language is, dramatically helps the learner to go from simple sentences to actual discourse. I highly recommend this book to any student of Russian, from novice to master. You can never speak a language too well!

I first heard about this book from my college Russian teacher, who gave it a strong endorsement as a must-have for all serious students of Russian. I couldn't agree more. This book provides Russian language roots alphabetically and lists around 3-10, sometimes even more words that are derived from that particular root. Memorization of the root leads to a rapid expansion of vocabulary derived from that root, cutting the amount of time spent memorizing vocabulary down significantly. It also allows you to figure out words with great accuracy if you're reading a text and stumble across an unfamiliar word. I strongly reccomend this book for all those who seek to learn to speak Russian fluently for any reason, as well as linguists who will be studying Russian and other Slavic languages.

This book of 450 different roots of the Russian language is the ultimate tool and guide to learning not only how to build your own words in conversation and in writing, but also (and I feel most importantly) in determining how to deconstruct words you pick up in reading and listening to better grasp their meaning.Patrick could easily have stopped at simply providing the roots, as well as words built from those roots, but he also gives you sentences with the words in them as examples. Last but not least, he provides a handful of exercises for practice at the end of the book. This book should be on the top shelf of every translator and/or student of the Russian language.

More than any other language I know, Russian is built upon roots. This book does a good job of presenting the most important roots of the Russian language, usually listing five or more different words formed from each root. Each new word is used in a sample phrase with English translation. The introduction discusses suffixes and prefixes (including prepositions that are used as prefixes). And, importantly for beginning students, all the Russian text is shown with accents!