Вверх! Building on Your Foundations in Russian

The ВВЕРХ! Series of Textbooks

Вверх! Building on Your Foundations in Russian is an innovative intermediate course that seamlessly blends rigorous grammar instruction with engaging and functional communicative class activities.

The course revisits topics typically covered in introductory courses, allowing learners to consolidate and expand their foundational knowledge. A blend of cultural insights, reading, listening, and viewing exercises enrich students’ cultural understanding. By presenting a range of examples from a variety of contexts, topics, and genres, students gain a broad and deep understanding of the nuances of Russian. Designed for those progressing beyond the basics, Вверх! leverages a core vocabulary of 1,500 words and strategically expands it by an additional 2,500 essential words, employing a color-coded system for ease of learning. By the end of the course, students will understand up to 70-80% of words in common usage.

The Вверх! Building on Your Foundations in Russian course consists of two volumes, each with nine chapters, containing everything students and instructors need for a dynamic exploration of Russian at the intermediate level. This companion website features downloadable workbook, glossary, vocabulary files, and audio and video resources that brings the series to life. The blended and modular format makes it easy for instructors to adapt the material to their learning goals and timetabling constraints.

Vocabulary Lists

Вверх! Building on Your Foundations in Russian features ambitious exposure to the most frequent and communicatively-necessary words in the Russian language and was developed in tandem with the Visualizing Russian project. Based on frequency of use, the communicative needs of students, the consensus of textbooks over the years, and our own teaching experience, we have identified four levels of vocabulary: Core, Foundations, Expansions, and Specializations. The Core words comprise around 1,500 lexical entries, corresponding to our targeted vocabulary for introductory Russian. The Foundations level presents another estimated 2,500 words and greatly expands and deepens the students’ vocabulary.*
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* The database behind our vocabulary levels as well as the online tools and website for the books currently contains 1,883 items in the Core level and 2,648 items in the Foundations level. We consider regular adverbs as part of the lemmas for adjectives (хоро́ший|хорошо́, бы́стрый|бы́стро, интере́сный|интере́сно, etc.) and consider verbs as part of aspectual pairs (чита́ть|прочита́ть, запи́сывать|записа́ть) or triplets (ходи́ть, идти́|пойти́, носи́ть, нести́|понести́), thus bringing that number down to our target of approximately 4,000 words (1,500 Core + 2,500 Foundations). A student with mastery of these two levels will have a robust vocabulary of 4,000 Russian words, or 4,531 lexical items if we separate adjectives and adverbs and consider imperfective and perfective verbs separately.
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The remaining words students will encounter in Russian are considered Expansions (15.7K words) and Specializations (12.6K words), categorized largely according to decreasing frequency of occurrence. The Expansions level comprises more nuanced general vocabulary and the domain-specific terms and jargon used in various fields of human endeavor. These are the words a continuing learner will be exposed to over many years or a lifetime of exposure to the Russian language and well exceed our expectations for the organized curriculum a student might pass through in high school and university studies. Decreasing frequency of occurrence continues into the Specializations level. Any words which do not appear in our database are left as black. This typically entails proper nouns (place names, people), neologisms, and slang.

The vocabulary for each chapter is printed in the textbook in two lists. The Словарь к главе/Vocabulary at a Glance section provides all relevant vocabulary (including a review of Core vocabulary along with the target Foundations vocabulary and with some related less frequent vocabulary from the Expansions and Specializations levels, rounding out the thematic topics for each chapter. The words in this section are printed in Russian only in the textbook, grouped together by semantic domain for easier reference. A version of this same vocabulary list in full, along with English glosses, is provided along with audio vocabulary podcasts here on the companion website. The printed textbook also features an alphabetized list of all the Foundations-level vocabulary (blue words). These lists and more are available to students and teachers here on the companion website so that learners can get the words off the page for easy access and integration into their own notes, apps, flashcards, and whatever resources they may choose to use to study and review vocabulary. At the end of the book, there is a comprehensive English-Russian and Russian-English glossary featuring all the relevant vocabulary included in the 18 chapters of the course.

The color-coding can be created for any text using the Visible Vocabulary tool on the Visualizing Russian website where any analyzed texts may be cut-and-pasted into other files to preserve the analysis. Users with colorblindness will find appropriately contrasting colors available in the Visible Vocabulary tool and in lists available here on the companion website.

Download these lists for your own use from the links below. We encourage you to make your own flashcards and to reorder the words, select/reduce/customize these lists to suit your own teaching and learning needs. These lists get the words off the page and into whatever format you find most useful for your learning, teaching, and assessment.

• Word Docs
• PDF Docs
• Excel Files
• Quizlet Lists

Explore all the Quizlet lists by chapter (all words in each chapter)
Go directly to (all words in each chapter):
Глава 1 — Глава 2 — Глава 3 — Глава 4 — Глава 5 — Глава 6 — Глава 7 — Глава 8 — Глава 9 — Глава 10 — Глава 11 — Глава 12 — Глава 13 — Глава 14 — Глава 15 — Глава 16 — Глава 17 — Глава 18

Explore all the Quizlet lists by chapter (just the green and blue words in each chapter)
Go directly to (just the green and blue words in each chapter):
Глава 1 — Глава 2 — Глава 3 — Глава 4 — Глава 5 — Глава 6 — Глава 7 — Глава 8 — Глава 9 — Глава 10 — Глава 11 — Глава 12 — Глава 13 — Глава 14 — Глава 15 — Глава 16 — Глава 17 — Глава 18

Explore all the Quizlet lists by chapter (just the blue words in each chapter)
Go directly to (just the blue words in each chapter):
Глава 1 — Глава 2 — Глава 3 — Глава 4 — Глава 5 — Глава 6 — Глава 7 — Глава 8 — Глава 9 — Глава 10 — Глава 11 — Глава 12 — Глава 13 — Глава 14 — Глава 15 — Глава 16 — Глава 17 — Глава 18


• Vocabulary Podcasts, Steven Clancy

Глава 1 — Глава 2 — Глава 3 — Глава 4 — Глава 5 — Глава 6 — Глава 7 — Глава 8 — Глава 9 — Глава 10 — Глава 11 — Глава 12 — Глава 13 — Глава 14 — Глава 15 — Глава 16 — Глава 17 — Глава 18

Glossaries and Appendices

• Pronunciation and Intonation Guidelines 540
• Grammatical Terms — Грамматические термины 551
• Russian Men’s and Women’s Names — Мужские и женские имена 557
(including patronymics and surnames)
• Stress Patterns in Nouns and Verbs 560
• One-Stem Verb Types 563

Workbooks

An Audio-Visual Syllabus for Вверх! on Padlet, Oksana Willis

You can find multiple audio-visual links to accompany the themes of the individual chapters of Вверх! here on Padlet.

Links to Visualizing Russian tools, Steven Clancy

Дополнительное чтение|Additional suggested readings

Additional materials? Crowd-sourced materials

Guidance for teachers and programs

Errata