Textbooks

The authors’ original introductory textbook of Albanian (Discovering Albanian 1, U. of Wisconsin Press, 2011) was hailed as “lightening the burden of the instructor, allowing for more productive efforts in designing an effective and modern syllabus,” and received the AATSEEL award for best annual contribution to language pedagogy. Now Slavica presents their intermediate-advanced textbook Advancing in Albanian to provide enhanced access for students to one of the major, but less commonly taught European languages. Albanian has been on track to join the European Union since 2014, and there are five million speakers of this language. The textbook and accompanying workbook transition from English to Albanian as the language of instruction over the course of the year, and are supported by substantial online downloadable audio files. Now achieving proficiency in Albanian will be more feasible without extensive in-country experience, and there is no better way to prepare to go work and live in Albania than to study with this textbook.

Thirty-five years after the publication of Charles Gribble’s monumental Russian Root List, Slavica Publishers offers Cynthia M. Vakareliyska’s Lithuanian Root List, the first list of common Lithuanian roots that contains their English meanings. Modeled on the Russian Root List, the Lithuanian Root List also provides the most common Lithuanian prefixes and suffixes, together with their English meanings. Cynthia M. Vakareliyska is Professor of Linguistics and member of the Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies program at the University of Oregon. Cover Artwork: Original paper cut design by Nijolė Jurienė, traditional Lithuanian folk artist. Photograph reproduced with permission of Laimutė Fedosejeva.

Book Reviews

Review in SEEJ, Vol. 60, no. 3 (Fall 2016), 593-594 pp.

Review in JSL, Vol. 24, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2016), 393-397 pp.

Part 1 covers chapters 1 to 6, or about one semester of college work: Part 2 covers the second semester, and Part 3 is for use in the second year. After Part 3 the student can read ungraded texts with the use of a dictionary.

A number of schools experienced dramatic increases in enrollment after adopting this book. Lipson's book was the first to use the Jakobson one-stem verb system in teaching Russian; it also introduced many other concepts to Russian pedagogy, and its ideas have been the stimulus for a number of other books (those published by Slavica include Townsend's Russian Word-Formation, M. Levin's Russian Declension and Conjugation, and Gribble's Russian Root List.) Lipson's book not only presents Russian grammar in a new and more accurate way -- it also motivates the students to learn by providing them with imaginative and clever situations and texts that overcome the students' self-consciousness and inspire them to speak. The book is full of a delightful humor that most students find an exciting change from the usual dry textbook style. Both American and Soviet life styles, values, and traditions are satirized. The Teacher's Manual by Molinsky is by far the most complete and thorough teacher's manual for any Russian textbook, and it makes using the Lipson book easy for beginners as well as experienced teachers, since it gives step-by-step instructions for each class hour, with sample lesson plans, assignments for homework, sample tests, and explanations of why the book is constructed the way it is and what each section accomplishes. The Teacher's Manual is particularly useful for schools where much of the teaching is done by graduate students, since it gives them the day-to-day guidance that they need when starting their teaching careers. Audio materials that accompany the language-learning text are available through Boston University's Geddes Language Center here: http://www.bu.edu/geddes/services

"It is unfortunate that Lipson chose to employ humor throughout the book for it limits the appeal of what is otherwise a well-organized and clear presentation of Russian grammar and morphology." (MLJ) (Note from the publisher: we agree that people without a sense of humor should not use this book, zhnor, probably, should they be asked to review itch, but most students do seem to have a sense of humor and like a textbook that has some. Being dry is not an obligatory quality of a textbook.)

Find Part 1 of the course here

or Part 2 of the course here

Part 1 covers chapters 1 to 6, or about one semester of college work: Part 2 covers the second semester, and Part 3 is for use in the second year. After Part 3 the student can read ungraded texts with the use of a dictionary.

A number of schools experienced dramatic increases in enrollment after adopting this book. Lipson's book was the first to use the Jakobson one-stem verb system in teaching Russian; it also introduced many other concepts to Russian pedagogy, and its ideas have been the stimulus for a number of other books (those published by Slavica include Townsend's Russian Word-Formation, M. Levin's Russian Declension and Conjugation, and Gribble's Russian Root List.) Lipson's book not only presents Russian grammar in a new and more accurate way -- it also motivates the students to learn by providing them with imaginative and clever situations and texts that overcome the students' self-consciousness and inspire them to speak. The book is full of a delightful humor that most students find an exciting change from the usual dry textbook style. Both American and Soviet life styles, values, and traditions are satirized. The Teacher's Manual by Molinsky is by far the most complete and thorough teacher's manual for any Russian textbook, and it makes using the Lipson book easy for beginners as well as experienced teachers, since it gives step-by-step instructions for each class hour, with sample lesson plans, assignments for homework, sample tests, and explanations of why the book is constructed the way it is and what each section accomplishes. The Teacher's Manual is particularly useful for schools where much of the teaching is done by graduate students, since it gives them the day-to-day guidance that they need when starting their teaching careers. Audio materials that accompany the language-learning text are available through Boston University's Geddes Language Center here: http://www.bu.edu/geddes/services

"It is unfortunate that Lipson chose to employ humor throughout the book for it limits the appeal of what is otherwise a well-organized and clear presentation of Russian grammar and morphology." (MLJ) (Note from the publisher: we agree that people without a sense of humor should not use this book, zhnor, probably, should they be asked to review itch, but most students do seem to have a sense of humor and like a textbook that has some. Being dry is not an obligatory quality of a textbook.)

Find Part 1 of the course here

or Part 3 of the course here

A manual to accompany A Russian Course by Alexander Lipson: The Teacher's Manual by Molinsky is by far the most complete and thorough teacher's manual for any Russian textbook, and it makes using the Lipson book easy for beginners as well as experienced teachers, since it gives step-by-step instructions for each class hour, with sample lesson plans, assignments for homework, sample tests, and explanations of why the book is constructed the way it is and what each section accomplishes. The Teacher's Manual is particularly useful for schools where much of the teaching is done by graduate students, since it gives them the day-to-day guidance that they need when starting their teaching careers.

What You Always Wanted to Know about Russian Grammar (*But Were Afraid to Ask) begins where textbooks and conventional grammars leave off: with the perplexing, poorly explained, often maddening aspects of Russian that drive English-speaking students and even their teachers and professors crazy! The author provides authoritative and thoroughly researched answers to 65 thorny questions submitted over a 10-year period by the readers of her regular column in the newsletter of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). Many of the questions deal with puzzling (quasi-)synonyms: when do I say this and when do I say that, and why? Other questions deal with contradictions: why does the textbook tell me to say this, but native speakers of Russian say that? Or why do older Russians say this, but younger Russians say that? In answering these questions, Dr. Israeli, a native speaker, draws on her decades of linguistic scholarship, lifelong love of puzzles, and general sense of humor to present the clearest, easiest-to-understand, and most humorous explanations of Russian grammar that you will ever read, most of them supported with real-life examples drawn from historical and contemporary prose, media, and the Internet. If you are an advanced student or instructor of Russian who has been struggling with the finer points of Russian grammar (and who among us hasn't?), this book is for you!

Alina Israeli was born and grew up in what she still calls Leningrad. From an early age she was fond of problems and puzzles and ended up in a mathematical high school and then at the math department at Leningrad University. Meanwhile (that is from a very early age) she was studying foreign languages: first French, then English, later Italian and Polish. Eventually she realized that she had confused her love of puzzles and logic with a love of math and became a student in the Russian department at Leningrad State University, where she began studying linguistics. In the mid-1970s she emigrated under the pretense of going to Israel (where she has never been to this day) and arrived in the US where she soon started studying Slavic linguistics at Yale. Ever since, she has been teaching Russian to Americans, which presented an interesting and never ending puzzle, bits of which she unravels in this book.

Book Reviews

Review in Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 55, no. 1/2, 2013: 252-253

Review in Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 57, no. 4, 2013: 701-702