Any cautions about vintage Russian textbooks?

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Elsa Maria
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Any cautions about vintage Russian textbooks?

Postby Elsa Maria » Fri Feb 03, 2017 5:01 pm

I recently bought two vintage Russian textbooks, and I am wondering if there are any changes in the Russian language that I should be aware of. For example, I know from my Danish studies that there was a spelling reform in 1948 and that formal personal pronouns are no longer in everyday usage.

These are the books:
Learning Russian I by Nina Potapova
Graded Russian Readers by Otto F. Bond (1961)

Oh and if you are wondering why I bought them, it is because I saw them at a good price, and I am generally fond of vintage texts.
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Re: Any cautions about vintage Russian textbooks?

Postby Arnaud » Fri Feb 03, 2017 7:41 pm

I've used the french version of Potapova, it's an excellent textbook, very demanding toward the end. It's the language you can find in the russian classical literature tinted by a few expressions of the communist era. But you have to know that the modern colloquial russian language is rather different from what you'll learn in that book: you'll have to update the software in a way or another in term of vocabulary and natives' language habits, especially if you want to communicate with young adults. In terms of grammar and orthography, there are no changes except perhaps the particule ли which is almost not used anymore to ask questions, but in the book you often meet it to ask simple yes/no questions in dialogs and a few special usages of the instrumental case that are now replaced by the locative (машиной / на машине is one that comes to my mind now)
I don't know the second book.

Edit: after consulting the book, what I said about ли is wrong, I mixed up with another book. The remaining is correct, a few words like товарищ, гражданин, etc, are only used in specific contexts now, and in general the current language is more "relaxed", less "tight" than the one met in that book. Also several texts concerning the geography of the USSR are completly outdated now.
Last edited by Arnaud on Fri Feb 03, 2017 8:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Elsa Maria
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Re: Any cautions about vintage Russian textbooks?

Postby Elsa Maria » Fri Feb 03, 2017 8:11 pm

Thank you, Arnaud. That is exactly what I was hoping to learn. Maybe it was your log where I found out about the Potapova book. I saw it on somebody's, but I couldn't remember whose.

Realistically, I can expect to be more in the company of Russian literature than Russian speaking young adults so that doesn't put me off :)
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reineke
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Re: Any cautions about vintage Russian textbooks?

Postby reineke » Fri Feb 03, 2017 8:18 pm

You may become fond of mustachioed father figures. I don't think that Russians made any major changes to their orthography after 1918. Software update, Russian 2.0 is a good way of putting it.
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Φιλόσοφος
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Re: Any cautions about vintage Russian textbooks?

Postby Φιλόσοφος » Fri Feb 03, 2017 9:15 pm

Those are very good texts. You have nothing to worry about. When you learn a language, you don't end up parroting what you studied, but develop a sense for propriety. Use them with ease.
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Re: Any cautions about vintage Russian textbooks?

Postby William Camden » Sun Feb 05, 2017 7:13 am

The Smirnitsky Russian-English dictionary is quite Soviet in its vocabulary choices and as an older dictionary it will not have modern concepts like mobile phones or the Internet, but it is still essentially a good dictionary for English-speaking learners of Russian, though supplementing it with more recent dictionaries is a good idea.
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