I am one of the co-authors of the Lonely Planet Ukrainian phrasebook which you have reviewed in a great level of detail in your above article. I just wanted to acknowledge that I find your comments quite useful and overall quite fair. I could disagree in some specifics, but your comments lay a solid expert ground for such a discussion. When we were preparing this book with Jim, we had to make some trade-offs and some of the choices we’ve made had different reasons behind, for instance, we tried to take into account some cultural and socio-linguistic aspects of potential user profiles.
Regarding your other review – the textbook by S. Pugh and I. Press – I wanted to refer to your phrase on “Their first language was and continues to be Russian. Otherwise these native speakers (to whom the authors are indebted, probably, Marina Kharitonova, Olena Bekh, Serhij Moroz, p. xv, Preface) could have corrected abundantly used Russian forms in this book”. I am a native speaker of Ukrainian using this language as my mother tong, but you should be aware that the status of a reviewer doesn’t allow one to CORRECT the script of the textbook, but rather provide comments to the publishers – which they may or may not use when revising the final script. I hope, this is helpful.

Anyway, let me once again thank you for the interesting LP book review and I am happy to further discuss with you and your colleagues any practical comments you would be willing to share with both me and Jim Dingley on our other book – Teach Yourself Ukrainian, of course, if you had a chance to see/use it.

Best wishes,

Olena Bekh