Lipson Alexander, Molinsky Steven J. A Russian Course. Volume 1

2nd preliminary edition. — Slavica Publishers, 1977. — xiv, 612 pages. — ISBN: 0-89357-040-0.Volume 1 covers all of the basic noun, adjective, pronoun, and verb forms, and prepares students to read simple graded texts.It normally requires about two college semestres of a 3-hour a week course, about one and one-half semesters of a 5-week course. High schools should complete it in two years.Volume 2 adds the grammar needed for reading ungraded texts. Much attention has been devoted to the principles of word building - prefixation and suffixation.It normally requires one additional semester of a 3-hour a week college, about twice that for high school courses.For classes that would like to start reading ungraded texts as early as possible, an appendix has been added to Volume 1. This appendix, selected from grammatical material of Volume 2, contains the essentials of imperatives, subjunctives, comparatives and superlatives, participles, and verbs of motion. It will require about six hours of a college course to complete.Note that a list of misprints discovered so far in Volume 1 is appended to this printing, immediately following the indices.In the first chapters, a wide range of grammatical forms have been introduced in simple form. This is to give students an opportunity to feel comfortable with as much of the basic grammar as possible early in the course. By the end of Chapter 3, the book has introduced nominative, accusative, genitive, and prepositional cases; gender; number; present, past, and future tenses; verb aspects; and relative clause formation. In later chapters, grammar is developed with more attention to detail and more extensive drills.The early chapters have large numbers of short stories with interconnected plots and repetition of vocabulary. Later chapters have fewer stories with more complex plot development.Answers have been provided to all drills and exercises. They appear on pages 542 to 578.