Russian Readers or Parallel Texts?

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mjb1971
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Russian Readers or Parallel Texts?

Postby mjb1971 » Sun Feb 26, 2023 12:48 am

I am looking for any references or recommendations for Russian-English graded readers or parallel texts.

I say graded, but I suppose I am really looking for material at the A1-ish level. My purpose here is to keep the massive input method in effect.

Currently I have Assimil, the Olly Richards reader, Easy Russian Reader App, Lingq, and a few other pdfs resources I have just ordered the Linguaphone course from AyanAcademy, so I am looking forward to that.

I also just ordered LE RUSSE VITE ET BIEN which is a reprint of the original from Omnivox press. Alexender A. Reviewed the Occitan text from this series in a recent video and the content was intriguing enough that I thought their Russian offering might be worth a look.

Matt
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stell
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Re: Russian Readers or Parallel Texts?

Postby stell » Sun Feb 26, 2023 1:14 am

I’ve been enjoying 25 Texts in Easy Russian from Red Kalinka. I bought it as an ebook, and it has parallel texts with full (human) audio. There are samples from that book and other A1 materials on the site:

https://shop.redkalinka.com/en/9-russia ... ital_ebook
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Arnaud
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Re: Russian Readers or Parallel Texts?

Postby Arnaud » Sun Feb 26, 2023 6:39 am

"Le russe vite et bien" is a good book (there are audio tracks that can be found online) but it's the same level as Assimil.
As to readers, I would advise two classical books (it's rather for B1 students, pdf online)
- Шкатулка пособие по чтению для иностранцев, начинающих изучать русский язык (accented) (red book)
- Удивительные истории. 116 текстов для чтения, изучения и развлечения (not accented) (green book)
If Шкатулка is too difficult, there is also Шкатулочка. Пособие по чтению для иностранцев, начинающих изучать русский язык that is probably for A0-A1 students.
There is also the textbook of Овсиенко Ю.Г. : Русский язык для начинающих. Each lesson of the book (there are 33 of them) is made of a dialogue and a text to read, I think there are about 50 texts of progressing difficulty to read in that textbook. (pdf online). That textbook is followed by a second volume made of texts only : Овсиенко Ю.Г. Русский язык. Средний этап
There is also Russian Languages Arts on YouTube : easy texts read slowly in russian.
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mjb1971
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Re: Russian Readers or Parallel Texts?

Postby mjb1971 » Tue Mar 07, 2023 1:25 am

Thanks so much for the tips, I will check these out!
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Doitsujin
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Re: Russian Readers or Parallel Texts?

Postby Doitsujin » Tue Mar 07, 2023 6:21 am

Aglona Reader - Windows/Android app for bilingual books; the author also offers several bilingual books by Chekhov, Pushkin and Dostoyevski for download (the books are in a custom .xml format).

Doppeltext - German publisher that offers some shorter bilingual books for free. For example, the short story Выстрел (=The Shot) by Alexander Pushkin.
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themethod
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Re: Russian Readers or Parallel Texts?

Postby themethod » Thu Apr 06, 2023 5:54 pm

So, I just wrote up like an essay-length review of various Russian readers but the forum decided to time me out and delete all of it when I was trying to post :roll:

Perhaps that's a good thing though, since you can just read the (slightly) condensed version instead of listening to my (even longer) rant.

- Olly Richards: These are decent if a bit lazy. Examples of laziness include using the same stories for each edition in every language, i.e., every "Short Stories in [Language] for Beginner's 1" uses the exact same stories. The only difference is what city the foreign exchange students in the first story visit and what kind of food the restaurant they go to serves.

The glossaries only include a handful of words, with no obvious methodology behind how they were selected, which I don't find very "beginner" friendly. And the stories themselves aren't particularly interesting.

In short, these are not readers created by experts in their specific language, made for teaching that specific language. They're a formulaic series published by a partnership between a Youtube polyglot and Teach Yourself. For instance, I wouldn't compare these to the "Read & Think in [Language]" or "Short Stories from [Mexico, Spain, etc.]" readers which also come from large publishers but actually have culturally significant stories specific to that language or region, rather than fill-in-the-blank creative writing exercises.

But they're still professionally published, nonetheless. And they're quite easy to get.

- Lingo Mastery: These do some things better than the Olly Richards books, like including a more substantial glossary and English summaries of each story.

But they seem to be even more formulaic, and I've read some worrying critiques of their business model as a whole since using them. For instance, their Russian conversations book has a review from someone claiming to be a Russian teacher who said the dialogues are crap and not how Russians actually speak.

But hey, they're cheap, and it's not like you're going to learn Russian from a couple short ebooks anyways.

- Readers for Russians learning English: It is possible to find parallel texts for Russians learning English, which can easily be used in the reverse direction, since they're just Russian and English on alternating pages. I've personally seen these available for at least the first two books of the Chronicles of Narnia series, as well as whole novels by Jack London, Charles Bukowski, etc., but it will likely be quite difficult to purchase these, especially at the moment. Searching for "параллельный текст" or similar wording on Yandex should usually turn up something.

Finally, I come to the recent series of parallel texts self-published by Prof. Mark Pettus. These may only be available on Amazon, but I'm not certain on that.

Not only do these blow the above books out of the water, I've yet to find readers of comparable quality in Spanish either.

They stand out for a few reasons:

1. Great selection of literature, including short stories, novellas, and even whole novels by Chekhov, Gogol, Dostevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, etc. in their entirety (Eugene Onegin, Notes from Underground, A Hero of Our Time, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, etc.)

2. Extensive glossaries, which not only define nearly every word on its first appearance, they also include grammatical info, like aspectual pairs; stress is also marked for all words

3. Glossaries that are placed after every few paragraphs for easy reference, rather than stuck at the end of a story or chapter

4. Translations were made specifically for these readers, with Russian + English presented in side-by-side columns on the same page

In combination, you have readers that are simultaneously rich with information and very easy to use, since you don't have to waste time flipping back and forth from page to page or looking up random words you forgot. I don't think you could make it any easier to read some of the most important works of Russian literature.
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