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Comment by animesh | Hacker News Reader

I am about 510 words of Russian in my 2rd attempt and I am finding it frustrating to not know why and when to use мамы маму etc even after completing nearly two checkpoints.

I decided to skip Duolingo in my third attempt. I found that the New Penguin Russian Course book for grammar is a good start. Could you please be kind and suggest if this is a good learning path? Many thanks.

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Unfortunately I cannot make real recommendations for Russian learning for non-native speakers, as for me it is simply the native language and stuff just magically makes sense. I quickly looked over the book you listed, it looks to me to be a million times better than whatever you would get out of Duolingo. It is actually the perfect way to do grammar imo, you get grammar lessons along with small injections of vocabulary and all the big grammar topics seem covered. I would work on it and supplement it with maybe some basic Russian media(as the vocabulary inside doesn't seem perfect for daily interactions), but yes this is a good resource. I will warn that to me at least Russian seems like one of those languages that will be very hard to learn without immersion.

Thank you for the vote of confidence, I will start with book right away. Regarding some of the vocabulary, I did read on reddit that some words are either out of usage or just plain inappropriate for daily usage. I will keep it in mind.

Immersion seems much more involved. I will plan for this. Thank you for your insight.

Just a question for everyone not recommending Duolingo: are you aware of the grammar notes that only exist on desktop? A lot of people miss them.

What's Duolingo Desktop? I'm on Linux.

Sorry I just mean the browser version, used on a desktop as opposed to mobile.

I learnt Russian at uni and our course book was the New Penguin course. I found the order of things being taught weird but otherwise an excellent book. I had however learned German and French well, so was already linguistically oriented. Things like cases just make sense to me. I'm not sure how good the book is if you're not that way inclined.

I can only tell you, if you don't deeply understand what cases do, when they are used, and what other languages do without them, you will always struggle. So maybe worth reading up on english-language articles, books, wikipedia (not necessarily about Russian, maybe even German), to understand more about them.

My native language has 8 cases, so it might be up my alley hopefully. Bought the book now, so only one way forward for me.

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