Preface

The Russian FAST course first appeared at FSI more than 15 years ago, and it has been growing and changing ever since. The current edition owes its existence to many individuals, all of whom we would like to thank. While time and space do not permit us to thank them all individually, we would like to bring special attention to the efforts of the following:

Without the computer skills and language teaching expertise of Language and Culture Instructor Garegin Petrosian, this book would not exist today. Thanks are also owed to Linda Coble and the staff in OMIS who responded, generously and promptly, to every request for software, as well as hardware.

Tatiana Hassan, Natasha Lord, Olga Shishkevish and many other Language and Culture instructors in the Russian Section make up the team which brought the first, and then later versions of the FAST course to our students. We are grateful to them all for their hard work and dedication. Special thanks are due Tatiana Hassan who has been the driving force behind the current FAST course and this latest version of the book.

Without the efforts of Lawrence Williams and David Coy in Multi-Media Operations we could not have produced the tapes which accompany this book. Thanks also go to those instructors in the Russian Section who lent their voices.

Thanks are also owed to all the Language and Culture Instructors in the Russian Section who gave so freely of their time to proofread, correct and suggest improvements to this book.

Our work on the FAST course has always enjoyed the support of our administration. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Dr. James Snow, Chair of NEE, Dr. David Argoff and Gary Crawford, Associate Deans of the School of Language Studies at FSI.

Finally, and most importantly, we are grateful to our students, who have so patiently helped us test these materials and who have so generously shared their comments. We have benefited greatly by their experiences, and we hope that our future students will do so as well.

Maureen Riley

Language Training Supervisor

Russian Language Section

September, 1995

	Note
	This course was formatted by Eric Streit (eric@yojik.eu) using the docbook format from the pdf scanned documents found on: http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php . The Russian part was checked by Gulnara Streit (my wife). You can find the pdf, epub versions on http://www.yojik.eu/ . (whole book or separate lessons) Version: 25 April 2011