Golden age of Russian literature

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.

Yulia is a diligent, interested and accomplished teacher. Working as a translator and teacher myself, it´s easy to see just how prepared, bighearted, and engaged she is. She very intently contributes to her students´ growth. There is a great assortment of interesting resources she kindly makes available on Russificate, as well as constant posts on language and culture and new exercises. By the replies on her page, I know I´m not the only student advancing. She is, indeed, very considerate and devoted to this project. Having family roots in Russia, I´m very glad Yulia is helping me better understand part of my cultural heritage. She´s been teaching me for about six months, and I think of her as a friend already. I find her truly inspiring.

Six months ago I had been studying Russian at University for 2 years. My level was already fairly good, but I had several shortcomings, especially with regard to speaking. Even if I knew I had a relatively good understanding of grammar and good pronunciation, until then I had had very few opportunities to speak Russian. I also have always had difficulty learning new words, and the fact of having very few opportunities to practice the language certainly did not help. Although the university had given me a good base, I realized that was not enough, so I turned to Russificate.

Six months ago I met my new Russificate teacher, Julia Sutuginiene . Since then, thanks to her, I have made tremendous progress. The first results were already visible after the first few lessons.

I do not know where to begin to list the qualities that I liked about Julia and her method. Probably my words will be few and won't do justice to the great experience I have had. Julia's lessons are never predictable or monotonous and all the time is exploited in full. Everything seems natural and sometimes even easy, yet it is clear that behind all this there is the teaching method, a thorough preparation of each part of the lesson, and last but not least, passion.

Julia uses films as part of her lectures: each lesson was built on a movie episode of 5-10 minutes. In my opinion, it is a revolutionary method because, in this way, the student has a point of reference that goes beyond simple notions of grammar and vocabulary found in books. This way, you have the chance to hear and practice the authentic, real language that Russians use in their everyday life.

Thanks to our work with the films and the continuous conversation practice I had with Julia - always and only in Russian - my active mastery of the language has improved a lot. I felt as if every week I did a "full immersion " into the Russian language and culture, and even if the lesson lasted only 90 minutes, I preserved my knowledge for another week until the next lesson.

Julia always tries to meet your needs in any possible way and you will not ever be disappointed . She is able to quickly understand what your limitations are and to organize her work in order to try to overcome them. With a difficult language like Russian the risk of being bored is very high, but in 6 months of lessons, I have never been bored! On the contrary, Julia has maintains her enthusiasm and now my passion for the Russian language and culture is more alive than ever.

Even though I still have much to learn, with Julia Sutuginiene I achieved the results that 6 months ago were unthinkable: no other teacher has ever managed to make me learn so much in so little time!

The best Russian teacher I've ever had.
VOTE: A+.