Oxford Picture Dictionary

As an ESL tutor I simply love these books. Each page provides a lesson's worth of vocab for practice in sentences. The latter pages (eg. prepositions) are less useful when tutoring someone illiterate in their own language, especially if the tutor is not bilingual, but because the pictures are so clear, even point-and-say usually works. True, these books don't have any pronunciation guides for Russians learning English or Americans learning Russian, but they are an excellent tool for tutoring; I don't expect everything from a picture dictionary that I would from interactive language software.

I also used this with my adopted children from Russia (then 6, 9 & 11) and found it extremely useful. It was easy for them to locate a picture they wanted to name, and made communnication much simpler!

As a department of defense trained russian linguist, i can tell you that this book is useful for english speakers learning russian. Russian pronunciation is fairly straightforward, and should only take a couple of days to learn. (if you don't have a source for listening, you don't have any business trying to learn a language like russian anyhow) After pronunciation is learned, this book is an excellent learning tool, because it is far more useful to learn the language using the cyrillic. This helps both russian language reading skills, and sight retention of foreign words, one of the hardest and most useful things to learn.No, it's not an easy book to learn with, so some might be turned off, but if you're truly committed to working hard at learning russian, than this book will teach valuable skills and vocabulary.

This is a very good book, but the online information failed to show that it is meant for Russians learning English (such as the ESL students mentioned in another review), not for English-speakers learning Russian. So, I was disappointed to get a book with no pronunciation help for the Russian words, when that is what I had expected.

We got this book to assist us with teaching our soon to be adopted 14 year old daughter English. The pictures are all coded with a number, and at the base of each page, there is a Russian and English word for what the numbered item is, in the picture. The dictionary shows various situations as one large picture: For example, each room of the house, and each item in each room is labeled. Also, school rooms, bus stops, all kinds of foods and "things". Airports, relationships (family tree), body parts, clothes, feelings, situations and so much! This is an awesome tool to use in communicating with someone of any age who speaks Russian and needs to communicate to you in English. (Or vice versa). I will also know by our daughter pointing to a picture and then the number associated with it, that we are talking about the exact same thing. She can read the Russian word, and I will tell her (pronounce) the English word. So, we are sure to be talking about the same exact thing. Paperback and easy to carry around. Very clever!