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Rating: 
Summary: Great for beginners to build a solid beginning base.
Review: I found this book to be excellent for beginners, especially if you are looking to begin speaking and writing right away. I do not like the organization of the book with grammar in the back of each chapter and everything else up front. Also, some of the essays in the book can leave you a little lost and there are some slight errors in some of the text, but otherwise it's a great book to get a solid beginning base on the language, especially in a formal classroom setting. I would not reccommend using this on your own! I like the fact that you must finish each chapter because that way you will not be lost in the rest of the book. Also, the book repeats some verbs and vocabulary so you get the chance to re-inforce some of what you have learned. I have two native Russian speaking friends who live in Russia and both say they are impressed with what I learned after year.(I had finished the book.) If you master this book, along with the work book and tapes, the rest is just building on grammar and vocabulary. If you are determined to learn this difficult language, this book will give you a great base to set you on your way!
Rating: 
Summary: "kind of like the opposite of an aerial view"
Review: I have attempted to learn from this book in a first-level university Russian course. (I am a middle-aged retired teacher, and already have some background in 4 languages, with reasonable success in all of them.) I'm sure that there's some sort of pedagogical theory which justifies the book's structure, but I find it a constant barrier to my learning. Each chapter is structured in the same way. Each starts with a Russian-only treatment of the materials to be covered in the chapter. Of course, virtually all the material is new to the reader at that point. The Russian section has pointers, therefore, into the following grammatical section, which is in English, and is at the end of the chapter. Unfortunately, the presented material is not well linearized, so after having stopped in mid-stream to read those grammar sections, and having flipped back and forth for a while, one still hasn't encountered all of the vocabulary and concepts in the current section. A chapter makes sense only when one has completed it, meaning that the process of learning is constantly frustrating, and lacking in the pleasures and rewards of mastery along the way. I don't find it any better to use as a review aid when test time comes along. If your prof has selected the text, you're stuck with it; I'd suggest finding some supporting ancillary materials, and using them from day one. I have the luxury of dropping the class. I've found a "Russian as a Second Language" series published in Russia for English speakers, and will hire a native-speaker college student to help me work my way through it. (The title is from a Steely Dan song, by the way. I'm a big believer in aerial views in first-level courses.)
Rating:
Summary: Not bad for beginners
Review: My university uses this book in first-year Russian. To be honest, I hated this book for the first several chapters/weeks. It takes a while to get used to the way it is arranged, because everything is presented in Russian first, then explained in English at the end. This is somewhat overwhelming for the beginner; however, if you aren't willing to plow on through, you probably won't be a very successful Russian speaker anyway. Anyone who expects a textbook to magically make learning Russian easy is probably in for an unpleasant surprise no matter what book they choose.Once we got used to the format, however, this book works very well. Unfortunately there is no intermediate book to follow it up yet, so our university had us using a completely different textbook for second-year. After using the new textbook, which is not very good and way too expensive for a paperback, I realize how good Troika really was. There aren't a whole lot of Beginner Russian textbooks out there, so if you're looking into a new textbook for your class, take a look at this one.
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