http://nhw.livejournal.com/993484.html

I found it really suited my current commuting habits: I ripped the CDs provided and was able to get through each of the 14 lessons in one or two days, listening on the MP3 player and ensuring I had a train seat with a table where I could scribble the answers to the written exercises. At first I was a bit worried about getting funny looks from fellow commuters as I muttered the responses to the spoken bits, but you stop caring after a while.

The structure of the course is decent enough; the most difficult bits for an English speaker - the dative, instrumental and prepositional cases of the nouns and adjectives - are introduced in the middle with the start and end being a bit easier (as long as you can cope with the alphabet, that is). I still would have liked more drilling on the declensions, and feel that is the one area where I was left feeling more aware of my inability to produce the right answer rather than confident that I would be able to do it eventually.

I was surprised and relieved to find the verbs really not very difficult, especially the past and conditional; I have bad memories of trying to get those right learning French, German and Latin! There is a distinction between perfective and imperfective verbs but I found that not too mind-bending (or at least easier than the nouns and adjectives). On the other hand, one unexpected pitfall in Russian is that the spelling is not always phonetic. Sure, compared to English or French it's pretty civilised, but I cut my Cyrillic teeth on Serbian and Macedonian and so am used to words being spelt the way they sound. I can't quite forgive the letter г for its treachery.

Anyway, it doesn't make me a Russian speaker by any means but does give me a solid foundation to build on. ( )