Brown Nicholas J. Russian Learners' Dictionary: 10, 000 Words in Frequency Order

Reprinted with corrections. — Routledge, 2003. — vi, 429 p. — ISBN: 0-415-13791-8; ISBN: 0-415-13792-6.Serious students of Russian are always aware that vocabulary acquisition is a major problem. Unlike Russian grammar, which has a structure and can be adequately mastered in a year, the vocabulary of the language is huge and amorphous. At the end of a year’s intensive study, students should have a good idea of how Russian works and the ability to handle a large number of everyday communicative situations, but their reading speed may be no more than two pages of a novel per hour, with the need for constant recourse to a Russian-English dictionary. ‘Go and read lots of Russian and increase your vocabulary,’ they are told. But which words to learn? Increasing one’s vocabulary is a time-consuming task for most students, and the process needs a structure. The list in this dictionary tells you which words to learn, and in what order.This dictionary contains 10,000 Russian words in order of importance starting with the most common and finishing with words that occur about 8 times in a million. All the words have English translations, many have examples of usage and the entries include information on stress and grammatical irregularities. There is also a complete alphabetical index to the words in the list.A learner who knows all or most of these 10,000 words can be regarded as competent in Russian for all normal purposes. The list takes you from a beginner's core vocabulary through to postgraduate level.