The present book is an elementary course of the Russian language for the staff of the hotels and restaurants. The goal of the book is to teach the service sphere workers to communicate with the Russian clients and visitors of restaurants, to understand their questions and to answer them. The course consists of two parts. The fi rst part introduces the phonetic rules of Russian and exercises which help to teach the students to hear, to read and to understand Russian words. The second part contains materials which will help to develop the oral speech, reading and writing skills. For those who want to learn Russian better, there is a section called «A bit of Grammar». Each lesson offers texts linked with the topic under study. They teach how to read in Russian and help to memorize words and sentences.