Pimsleur is good to give you a foundation — maybe even before you go to an instructor. If you can keep with it, you may find that it’s less embarrassing than having an actual person.

If you are a person who is good at mimicking foreign sounds, Pimsleur might be good for you, but if you find yourself unable to make “new” sounds, you might need an instructor who is there to correct you when you say something wrong. Pimsleur is great tongue exercise, though, and teaches you a well-selected range of vocabulary. It is not grammar intensive, so you’ll need to study up on your Russian grammer (I recommend Schaum’s or a Barron’s Masturbasics).

StudyCard is good, but it has some serious problems which the author pretty much refuses to address, one of which is that it supports WorldText, but not Unicode. He promised to have Unicode by last year and didn’t deliver. His excuses are unbecoming of him, too.

That having been said, I do use StudyCard Studio, I just can’t copy and paste from Unicode applications, which just means I end up improving my Russian typing, which, in the end, is good.

Pimsleur you can find on the BitTorrent circuit for free. StudyCard Studio costs money to register, but despite its shortcomings, it has been worth it and is a very good flash card program. You can try it for free.