Outline of Colloquial/Conversational Russian:

Linguistic Overview of the System

 

James Holbrook has been a scholar and practitioner of Russian since 1961. After a 75-week course at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, he spent over 28 years as an Army Russian linguist. He lived and worked in Moscow for nearly four years (1979-1981, 1994-1996)where he also taught a course in English and lectured on colloquial Russian at the MoscowLinguistics University. He has taught the language at all levels: tutor, elementary, high - school, and college. A former assistant professor of Russian at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, he did research and teaching of Russian at the U.S. National Security Agency. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian and Linguistics from Georgetown University.

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The primary purposes of this book are to highlight the importance of Colloquial Russian in the classroom and to identify the differences between standard textbook presentations and the actual conversational Russian of educated native speakers. This is the first book in English to present Colloquial Russian as a coherent linguistic system. Chapters show linguistic evidence of its systemic patterns. Based primarily on tape-recorded examples by Soviet/Russian scholars from Moscow and Leningrad, the book presents an outline of the more salient linguistic features of colloquial phonetics, morphology, syntax, word order, and vocabulary. The last chapter presents some recommendations on how various elements of colloquial Russian may be introduced into the classroom.