Culture of the Peoples of Russia and Surrounding Countries

I have had the pleasure to be the student of Tatiana Martin for a year.

Though I have had russian lessons before, and I was hesitant to continue lessons over Skype. Nonetheless, I started learning Russian with Tatiana while still at a beginner level. Though Russian is a difficult language, after months of unbroken 2 lessons a week I started to be able to read short passages, which quickly improved to reading easy short stories. After about a year I was able to hold a very basic short conversation with good grammar and vocabulary, as well as understand some passages of Russian songs and understand russian news tweets.

Tatiana is a very patient teacher, she is organised, and takes the time to prepare lessons and follows up with homework. She is also very friendly and breaks the formality of the lessons to make them fun and enjoyable.

The Russificate school is very comfortable to deal with, and Yulia, its director, is very organised and punctual regarding replying to email enquiries and sorting out payments.

Katya has been my Russian tutor for about 5 months and has done an excellent job at teaching me the basics of Russian. She follows a logical and clear structure to her lessons and ensures my understanding. I have appreciated the pace she sets for my progression through the lessons so that I am challenged but also have enough time for review and comprehension. Katya has great balance of asking consistent questions each lesson to help me gain confidence in my speaking skills. I also appreciate her use of varied mediums including recorded dialogues, written texts and review of homework to help me learn Russian in many contexts.

I have been told by my colleagues at work that when I speak in Russian, I do not have an accent. This shows how much care Katya has put into my speaking skills!

Yulia is a great teacher and I would highly recommend her. Her lessons combine a good balance of the key skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking, so you cover and develop all the fundamental aspects of language learning with every lesson. The lessons are almost entirely in Russian, which was challenging initially; however, I have found that this immersion in the language prompts faster development as you have to rely on your Russian all the time, rather than switching to your native language for comfort which is all too easy to do. Yulia has a lot of patience and has the ability to explain things in a very clear and methodical way. You do not feel afraid to make mistakes or ask questions. I hope to use Russian for work in a legal context in the future and I was particularly impressed by the effort which Yulia went to, to find legal resources for me. It really shows that she is willing to go out of her way to help her students and she will listen to you and meet your objectives.