Russian mentality

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+.

Most Russian teachers out there claim that they are very excellent teachers with so many years of experience in their bags, but in fact they are only natives with no real teaching background. However, with Yulia, it is a whole new ball game. She's a native Russian teacher and she really know how to teach her mother tongue properly. Also, she's completing all her teaching with many excellent exercises, which in my own opinion, help quite a lot to assimilate knowledge. I highly recommend her! I wish I would have known her sooner.

I met Alexandra three years ago. At that time I was a post-graduate student at the Catholic University of Milan and I was conducting research for my doctoral dissertation in Moscow. I approached a Russian language school because I wanted to improve my spoken Russian, and I registered for individual classes with Alexandra. She is an extremely competent teacher – friendly, with an excellent command of her subject. Perhaps most of all I appreciated the fact that she was interested in linguistics, and we could discuss some of the topics that I was examining as part of my research. I still have the book by M. Kronhouse that she gave me!