This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Well, as any of you beginning Russian students may have noticed by now, there is NOT much out there in the way of aids for learning.
Here you can download some of the tools that I've been using in my own studying.
Please feel free to use my stuff, just don't start selling it as your own work. Especially cause, umm... I'm giving it away for free, and I was the one that actually did the work!
In the next few weeks, I'll be uploading some vocabulary lists.
First up, my First Semester Core Vocabulary List. This document is a PDF file.
Note that it's divided into seven tiers -- basically, I counted the number of different first-year book "active vocabulary" lists a given word appeared on, and then noted whether, in any given book, the word appeared in more than one chapter's vocabulary list. The total number of chapter lists that a word appeared on, times the number of books the word was included in, gave me a numeric value between 1 and 24. The best-scoring words are in Tier 1; the ones with a score of 3 (the lowest one I included on this page) are in Tier 7. There are a few tiers with more than one score, for instance, only one word got a score of 18, so I stuck it in with the 15s in Tier 2, rather than giving its own tier.
If you're taking first year Russian, I can pretty much guarantee you that you need to know and be extremely comfortable using all of the Tier 1-5 words. After that, the usefulness and necessity of any given word becomes more variable; I eliminated most of my "eh, maybe not" words by including only words with a score of 3 or higher. Personally, I wouldn't want to go into a first-term Russian final without being extremely comfortable with the entire list as in this file. I'd consider anyone who shows up to a second-term Russian final without knowing all of those words to be... extraordinarily unwise. And I can't imagine someone doing well in a third-term Russian course without all of these words. Plus many, many more.
Next up? Second semester Russian! Later on I'll be adding my second-year lists, followed by topical lists. Probably starting with my religious vocabulary, since I already have so much of it. ^_^
Note: if you want to get started in a hurry, and you've never done anything with Russian before, go here. Follow the prompts (you can also print out the pages, if you're working with someone else) and you'll have the alphabet down by the time you're done, as well as some basic vocabulary. I like this site because it's considerably more user-friendly than your average beginner textbook on this same subject.
NOTE: The author (Sarah Marie Parker-Allen) gives EXPLICIT permission to alter these documents for personal or educational use. See the Creative Commons license below. ^_^
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.