Coyote Russian: Free Russian Courses

Open Russian Audio and PDF Courses

• Course One: First Two Semesters of Russian (SLA101) - 84 Lessons
• Course Two: Second Two Semesters of Russian (SLA105) - 118 Lessons
• Course Three: Russian Story - 21 Lessons (Part of Courses One and Two)
• Course Four: Fifth Semester of Russian (SLA207 - Audio only - Prose and Songs)

These files are the Princeton Russian courses, released to the public around 2003 under the equivalent of the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License with the added stipulation that if you offer these on the web, you must offer all of the courses. They were released in a chaotic three-gigabyte zipfile that had not only the current course files but also earlier drafts of PDFs and duplicate directories and other wierdnesses. No-one set up a website for all these courses. They just passed around the hunormous zipfile. So eventually this massive file became available only from subscriber download sites -- which cost you money. And, given its size, the zipfile was never available to those students with limited bandwidth. I doubt if any of this is what the original authors intended when they decided to share their work with us.

The purpose of this project is to offer all of these brilliant open Princeton Russian courses in a form that is available to anyone with Internet access. There are a few things you should keep in mind:

1. All audio is pure Russian. If you are willing to cut and paste the English from the pdfs into an on-line translation system like Google Translate, you could use this course no matter what your native language.

2. The original courses were in a state of being reworked. So the numbering of things is sometimes wierd. Also, the directory structure has been simplified in the interest of having reasonable (30Mb or less) download sizes. Don't let any of this bother you -- everything is here in its proper order.

3. The dialogs in the pdfs and mp3s sometimes differ. In almost every case the differences are trivial. In the first course, only Lesson 64's dialog has been seriously reworked. But by lesson 64 you can deal with that, right?

4. The original naming convention for the files was dangerous and even unusable in some mp3-players. The new convention prevents overwrites and works in all players. For example: 1-5202-p3.mp3 is CourseOne-Lesson52Track02-Page3InThePDF.mp3. Safe and simple. Just like sex should be.

5.Every dialog.mp3 had a matching dialog-with-pauses.mp3. In the interest of bandwidth, those are gone. If you need pauses, use the pause button on your mp3-player (doh!). Even more bandwidth was saved by downsampling all of the voice audio as far as possible without sacrificing clarity. Music audio has been left at its full 44.1 khz bandwidth.

Also available: Coyote Chinese

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