Not bad, but everything else is better.

At first glance, it seems too good to be true: A lesson/excercise book with grammar tables, a pocket dictionary, and 3 lesson CDs. What a bargain!
Living Language attempts to teach reading, writing, grammar, and every day conversation all in one convenient package, but does none of these tasks particularly well. For every positive point a reviewer might make about Living Language, I can point to other available products that do it much better. The dictionary? The Langenscheidt Pocket Russian Dictionary is the gold standard, although it's difficult to do worse than Living Language in this area. The lesson book? I'd recommend any of the 5-star Russian grammar texts via Amazon, and most cost a lot less. Conversational Russian on CD? Granted, I haven't heard all of them, but Living Language is near the bottom of the pile, if not actually occupying that position. In this case, Pimsleur is the absolute best of the best; your functional fluency will improve immensely, and natives will compliment your pronunciation--if and when they realize you are actually an American.
Again, it's difficult to recommend this Living Language course to anyone, because it doesn't particularly excel at anything. For a beginner, this will be 6 weeks of foreign language hell. For an advanced-intermediate Russian speaker such as myself, this will be about a week or two of slogging through tedious grammatical review.
Perhaps 10-15 years ago when Russian materials were few and far between, this Living Language course would have been the biggest bang for your buck available. Today however, the availability and quality of alternative products renders this one obsolete.

Useless course in Russian

This set has 3 CD's, a Russian coursebook, and a Russian dictionary. The coursebook does have information in it but the book is not put together in a way that aides learning.
The first lesson is 5 pages long. Part A is titled The Letters and Sounds of the Russian Language but tells you that the letters and sounds will be learned in another chapter. Part B gives a list of people's names and Part C lists geographical names.
Lesson 2 is just another list of words and names.
Lesson 3 gives a list of the Cyrillic alphabet and the names of the letters but not the sounds!
The dictionary might be ok but since I don't know Russian, how would I know. The front of this book gives a 4 page pronunciation chart.
I do think the coursebook would be ok for a phrase book.
I don't think the CD's are very useful except the parts that conjugate verbs.
Overall, this is not worth paying full price.

Weird pronounciation

I bought this product a few months ago.I started using the cds and everything seemed ok at first.I also take classes in russian.My teacher is russian.I'm taking classes for 6 months now.As i was getting better i realized that some of the words where pronounced very wierd.For example the female speaker pronounces the word "shto" which means "what" as "chto" while the male speaker pronounces it regularly as "shto".This is not standard russian accent.I've never heard of any russian saying "chto".So i thaught that this must be some regional accent.I even asked my teacher about this and she laughed.She said that she is not aware of any region in Russia where "shto" is pronounced as "chto".Also some word endings are pronounced wrong.For example a "b" at the end of a word should be pronounced as p,while a b in this course is always a "b" no matter where it is positioned in a word.Has anyone else noticed these?A review of a native speaker of russian would help a lot.