3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Do you need to learn Ukrainian?, 22 Jun 2009
There's no doubt this is a good product and I assume they've updated it since I bought it three years ago - then it was only available with tapes, I guess CDs are included on new versions.
My advice, however, would be to learn Russian rather than Ukrainian if you intend to travel to Ukraine. It will be more useful to you, there are more langauge products available for Russian and it's very widely used in Ukraine. Russian is also going to be useful to you in other countries, nto least of which would be Russia! You only really need Ukrianian if you're travelling to Western Ukraine.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Three stars only because the other options are little better, 17 Dec 2009
This review is from: Teach Yourself Ukrainian (Teach Yourself Languages) (Paperback)
I've bought three books in this series and been disspointed by all of them. This one to it's cedit has few mistakes, sensible content, and is reasonably possible to follow without a doctorate in languages. However it's let down by some fairly critical blunders, for example there isn't a listing of the Ukrainian alphabet in the normal order anywhere in the book, and if you want to look something up - numbers, say, or the past tense of the verb 'to have' - there's no way to find things easily, and the index at the back is hardly worth of the name. The typeface is also rather poor - the alphabet table that is provided (albeit in completely the wrong order) is at times hard to compare with other written materials. The explainations of grammar are largely impenetrable, which is probably why the book sensibly tries to concentrate on practical language rather than grammar. This is good thing, as you can communicate without being gramaticaly correct. However, because coverage is incomplete you often don't know what you're missing. All in all an acceptable help, and we use it as tool - supported by other materials - in the ukrainian evening course I'm doing at a local university. Without the course I'd be lost in this. I found Colloquial Ukrainian much easier to follow for private study and much more clearly laid out than this, though this has the edge in class. The truth is language materials for Ukrainian are really not that great. I've combined this, Colloquial Ukrainian, and an evening course with some tapes for the car, and that creates some balanced study. This book alone won't do it though. Would I recommend it? Yes, but only because if you want to learn Ukrainian (and I would definately recommend that - ignore the suggestion to learn russian) there aren't a lot of options. I personally prefer a more structured approach to language learning, but there isn't anything I can find that provides that.
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