Schaum's Outline of Russian Vocabulary

Rating:
Summary: A good idea gone bad! Forget it!
Review: Schaum's "Russian Vocabulary." This is supposed to a text in vocabulary building for everyday situations. However, the authors/publisher really missed the proverbial boat: There are no accent marks for any of the words in this book! The book title should be "We'll Show You What the Words Look Like in Print, But We Won't Tell You How to Pronounce Them Correctly." Any student of Russian knows how unpredictable the stress of Russian words is. It's really a rather nasty little joke to sell you a vocabulary book without the accent marks. You would have to look each word up in a dictionary to find out how to say it -- an impossible task. Ironically, accent marks are included in Schaum's Russian Grammar book. In short, this book is totally useless for learning new vocabulary unless you want to risk putting the accent on the wrong syllable (and perhaps totally changing the meaning of the word). What were they thinking!