Introduction

This online Grammar contains most of the grammar and vocabulary explanations from the second edition of Beginning Russian (Slavica Publishers, 1991). It allows easy access to the material for a student who is using other online courses and likes reading linked comments and searching through them.

Lora's Dialogs, for example, inclide many links to the relevant sections of this Grammar.

Teachers who create online materials for the study of Russian should feel free to provide links to this text. As long as the Web server at Cornell University's Russian Language Program remains in operation, this Grammar will be freely accessible on the Internet.

This is not a reference grammar. Beginning Russian is a textbook written for a two- or three-semester college course. It includes discussion of all the major grammatical categories of Russian.

The grammar in Beginning Russian is complete in the sense that all of the major grammatical categories of the language are presented, though not, of course, exhaustively discussed.

The individual grammatical statements are complete in the sense that they are true for the language as a whole, not just for the language material immediately at hand; in other words, grammatical statements here are not simplified in order to make things "easy" for the beginner, but rather are intended to be useful to the mature user at later stages of learning. You won't have to unlearn half-true rules when you get to your second or third year of study.

The authors have tried to make the statements on pronunciation and grammar and word usage as simple and concise as possible within the bounds of accurate linguistic analysis of the language. Nevertheless, language is a complex thing, and our grammatical presentation does not shy away from this complexity, partly on the grounds of accuracy, partly on the grounds that complexity is one of the things that makes the study of language fascinating and enjoyable.

Just as the book Beginning Russian was designed to be used in conjunction with the dictionary 5000 Russian Words, so this online Grammar should be used with the expanded electronic version of that dictionary, called The Russian Dictionary Tree.

The Russian Dictionary Tree and another electronic resource for first-year students, called Beginning Russian Quizzes are also available on CD-ROM and diskettes from Lexicon Bridge Publishers (http://lexiconbridge.com).

The original text from Beginning Russian was reformatted and slightly edited by Slava Paperno, who alone is responsible for any errors in spelling and style. Please report these by email.

For your next visit, make a bookmark for this page or use the link at our home page, russian.cornell.edu. Cornell University This Web site uses custom Russian fonts with accented vowels.