What do you think?
Rate this book
201 Russian Verbs; Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses, Alphabetically Arranged.
Book by Davis, Patricia Anne
224 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1970
22 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 2, 2008
Got something to say? Chances are you'll be needing a verb. In your native language, you won't really have to think about it - the correct tense and form should bubble up to the tip of your tongue, unprompted. If you're trying to navigate a foreign language, then you'll have to build a little reference table in your head, and do a quick table look-up to retrieve the correct form. The sneaky part: in many languages the most commonly used verbs are irregular, requiring extra memorization of the specific associated forms. The perverse truth is that, generally speaking, the more common the verb, the greater the degree of irregularity.
Which is part of what gives books like this one their appeal. Wander over to the foreign language section in any bookstore, and you're almost guaranteed to find books which promise:
101 verbs
201 verbs
501 verbs
"fully conjugated in all the tenses".
Psychologically, buying one of these books is a little bit like buying an insurance policy - it feels like a hedge against future problems, and depending on how ambitious you're feeling, you can invest in a greater or lesser degree of protection (I've even seen numbers as high as 1001, presumably designed for the true super-achiever).
Of course, continued investment in this kind of book (and I have them for every foreign language that I've ver studied) also represents the triumph of hope over experience. As the cashier rings it up, you have a clear vision of yourself, spending large amounts of well-organized time with your new purchase. Just like in high school, when we cycled through the 250 or so irregular German verbs, on a 5-a-day schedule, which started afresh when we reached "zwingen".
Problem is, without some external pressure to enforce the necessary discipline, it's pretty much a given that your resolve will start to slip, usually somewhere around week 3. I have to think that this is the explanation for the odd phenomenon that my command of irregular verb forms in several languages decreases as one goes down through the alphabet. Furthermore, I'd be willing to bet that this is a fairly general phenomenon.
Strictly speaking, one should not hold the authors of books like this one responsible for readers' failure to engage with their product in a fully efficient manner. So let me hedge my rating as follows:
if you are that rare person with the discipline to use the book regularly: 4 stars
if you are like the rest of us: 3 stars.
If you are foolish enough to be learning Russian, you will (of course) want to augment this book with a more specialized book dealing with those pesky verbs of motion. But that's a whole 'nother story.
Which is part of what gives books like this one their appeal. Wander over to the foreign language section in any bookstore, and you're almost guaranteed to find books which promise:
101 verbs
201 verbs
501 verbs
"fully conjugated in all the tenses".
Psychologically, buying one of these books is a little bit like buying an insurance policy - it feels like a hedge against future problems, and depending on how ambitious you're feeling, you can invest in a greater or lesser degree of protection (I've even seen numbers as high as 1001, presumably designed for the true super-achiever).
Of course, continued investment in this kind of book (and I have them for every foreign language that I've ver studied) also represents the triumph of hope over experience. As the cashier rings it up, you have a clear vision of yourself, spending large amounts of well-organized time with your new purchase. Just like in high school, when we cycled through the 250 or so irregular German verbs, on a 5-a-day schedule, which started afresh when we reached "zwingen".
Problem is, without some external pressure to enforce the necessary discipline, it's pretty much a given that your resolve will start to slip, usually somewhere around week 3. I have to think that this is the explanation for the odd phenomenon that my command of irregular verb forms in several languages decreases as one goes down through the alphabet. Furthermore, I'd be willing to bet that this is a fairly general phenomenon.
Strictly speaking, one should not hold the authors of books like this one responsible for readers' failure to engage with their product in a fully efficient manner. So let me hedge my rating as follows:
if you are that rare person with the discipline to use the book regularly: 4 stars
if you are like the rest of us: 3 stars.
If you are foolish enough to be learning Russian, you will (of course) want to augment this book with a more specialized book dealing with those pesky verbs of motion. But that's a whole 'nother story.
September 7, 2018
Dull as dirt, but does what it needs to do. Beware, though, if you have a Maine Coon cat. Maine Coon cats tend to gnaw on the corner of this book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews