neofight78
Russian Audiobook Recommendations

I'm looking for a good source of books in Russian that has both the text and audio. I'm looking for digital rather than physical formats, and I don't mind paying if necessary.

 

I should mention that various classics are not too hard to find, but I want to avoid anything that uses old fashioned words or a literary style. I'm looking for modern everyday Russian.

 

Primarily I'm looking for good site recommendations but of course book recommendations would be appreciated as well if you can tell me where to obtain them from - both text and audio.

 

Can anybody help me out?

 

 

Mar 28, 2015 8:50 PM
Comments · 26
3

3) We rarely buy electronic content:-/ So I just don't know where to obtain such things legally.
For pirated movies and audiobooks see our major torrent tracker - rutracker.
Needs registration, but it is 'the default tracker' wothout too much ads, so one wouldn't regret that he has registered.
There are few major trackers which don't need registration: tfile, for example.

Until recently people massively listened to music and watched films and series and on vk. It is our variant of facebook.
Recently they started to remove copirated videos. Only new, i.e. contemporary ones, but including modern porn:) But it is still our substitute to youtube - it is much more convenient when you wish to try/listen to more that one song. There are lots of audiobooks there as well.

And there are several libraries with texts around:

The oldest one is lib.ru... and there are several others.

lib.rus.ec (equador-based) is more recent development.
was going to become a 'defaul pirate library' - but they they moved  from the darkness into the 'grey' area. They reached some agreement with some representatives of some major copyright owners... and changed rules. It caused discontent inside their own community and made it less convenient (needs registration).

Thus <a href="https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B1%D1%83%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0">флибуста</a> (I linked the WIki page here) has forked from it and stays true to Jolly Roger. It get's attacked quite often and the site is inaccessible sometimes.

March 29, 2015
2

@KP

 

I understand your point, if I do read the more classical and literary stuff it will be further down the line. Simple modern Russian is difficult enough for me ;) Maybe it's not analogous but knowledge of Shakespeare, the Bible and the Greek classics all help with one's understanding of English, however most of us get by just fine without knowing anything about them. Besides I'm not sure how well emulating Russian education for children would work, being a middle aged Englishman I am coming from a completely different starting point! :)

 

If you have any links that you don't want to share in an open forum just message me. I of course prefer legal if possible but if somethings not available legally then what can one do....

 

Thanks for the links and suggestions, I'll be sure to take a look.

March 29, 2015
2

Now having this said,

2) polyglots often recommend listening audiobooks as a methond.
And also they sometimes recommend books in translation. Not as the source of spoken language.... but because it represents the most 'neutral' variation of literary language.

And free of some complications, which every decent writer introduces and every modest translator dares not:) Though this language is rarely feels 'lively', it is still much useful subset of language for communicational purposes. So you may just read stories about Sherlock Holmes.

I don't know much about modern prose.

March 29, 2015
2

neofight78, I absolutely disagree here. I mean, I perfectly understand ones wish to know everyday language. I'm learning an Arabic dialect, one of the most divergent ones - you have probably noticed the attitude educaed Arabs have towards the whole "MSA vs. dialect" issue. But you've said 'avoid', and here I'd advise the oposite. As I said somewhere else - we start with Pushkin's poems in preschool age - and keep memorizing them up to the last grades of school.

In other words, 19 century language is still actual and it affects spoken Russian.
Yes, there are less educated people, who havent' beek reading a lot of books when they were childs.

The idea is that it is nice to follow the same trajectory as those Russians whose speech you are going to imitate. As your understanding of Russian is (and will be) imperfect, it can happen that you will use some archaic words. I.e. contamination you plan to avoid can actualy happen.

But without this you will never feel the language the same way. You guard yourself from valuable information on modern spoken Russian. And by the way - our speech can get contaminated as well (apart form jokes, register, deliberate usage and usage of still 'actual' words, etc.)

March 29, 2015
2

May be this will help you, it has a lot of different interesting topics.

http://tvkultura.ru/article/show/article_id/130151

http://tendering.vgtrk.com/    ; вгткр   Russian TV

Best wishes!

March 28, 2015
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