Sources for Russian Books and Audiobooks

I am so excited I can hardly type. I just found this link this morning:

http://www.litportal.ru

It has every book you could ever possibly want to read in Russian for FREE!!! Everything from the classics like Tolstoy etc. to more modern writers like Ulitskaya and Rubina. You can read it on the screen or download a word doc.

Another great site is http://ayguo.com/ where you can get audio books for FREE of many classics like Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, Chekov, Turgenev etc. The sound quality is excellent and the downloads are not really long so it won't take you days to do it.

I'm basically at an intermediate level in both Russian and German. What I am finding in my own personal experience is that grammar books bore me to death and exercise books often have examples that are just things that normal people don't say in everyday speech. So I've embarked upon an ambitious project to try and read some of my favorite books in their original languages. That way I have the english copy and I can compare it to the original Russian as I go along. This also prevents having to look up every last word in the dictionary. I'm finding most words are not literal translations anyway - its concepts that are re-worked.

I've been pleasantly surprised so far. All those grammar rules suddenly make more sense when you start recognizing them in "real contexts." Flash cards help with unfamiliar grammar. I recommend using the program iflash. It also helps because you don't end up writing English all over your Russian texts. That way each time you read it you're not "cheating" by looking at the English equivalents scribbled all over the page when you don't remember something.

Recommended Georgian Book

As any of you that are interested in learning Georgian know there are very few resources available out there. One that I ran across recently that I thought was pretty good is:

http://www.survivalgeorgian.com/

It's relatively inexpensive at $14 (including shipping). The book size is a little weird. The pages are landscape printed on what looks to be 6x8 paper. But material wise it covers all the basic phrases you could ever possibly want to use in Georgian.

What makes it valuable is that virtually any other book you'll find on Georgian teaches you all the grammar and all sorts of words that you'll probably never use (i.e. Aronson has a lot of words like linguist, morphology, printing house etc.).

This is a practical "speak it like a native" type of guide without all the muddle and confusion of grammar to frustrate you.