Tom Besinger
Tom Besinger is an engineer in Vienna. He spent a year building Language through Literature, a glossed reading room for the Russian classics, including Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He used a language model and extensive dictionary checking to mark the dictionary form, meaning, and stress of every word, before measuring what he had created and discovering that some of his findings contradict the advice Russian language learners are usually given.
Interviews with Tom Besinger
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1
The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners
by Nicholas J. Brown -
2
A Frequency Dictionary of Russian
by Elena Umanskaya, James Wilson & Serge Sharoff -
3
Russian Stories: A Dual-Language Book
by Gleb Struve (editor) -
4
Short Stories in Russian: New Penguin Parallel Text
by Brian James Baer (editor) -
5
White Nights
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Learning Russian Books, recommended by Tom Besinger
Learning Russian Books, recommended by Tom Besinger
If you dream of reading Russian literature in the original, how do you get from the language of the textbook to the language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? Tom Besinger, who spent a year building a glossed reading room for the Russian classics, recommends five books for learning Russian, focusing on the difficult middle ground between finishing a textbook and being able to read confidently in the language. He also explains why the advice normally given—to start with something short—is wrong.
