The book contains about 100 short texts and exercises. All texts are authentic, interesting and funny. The foreign students can read this book just at the initial stage of learning Russian. The reader can find here information about the culture and traditions of Russia, funny stories from the life of Russians and foreigners, jokes and many other interesting texts. The majority of the texts was written specially for this manual and is being published for the first time. The book is formed according to the Curriculum of the elementary level. New grammar forms are introduced in the text material step by step. At the end of the book the reader can find more difficult texts (chapter “For those who want to learn more vocabulary