Most Russian courses suffer from an inadequate approach to the presentation of syntax even though continued emphasis on syntax from the beginning would help to remove the trial and error syndrome inherent in purely audiolingual methods and would channel the student's efforts to internalize and make automatic his answers in a relevant context, thus making his studying more efficient. Such a syntactic approach often provides the only meaningful explanation of the differentiation of ostensibly similar (to the student) grammatical forms. Essential to any first-year course are a variety of sentence structures including embedded, interrogative, and declarative sentence types, and relative clause constructions. (Author/VM)