Students usually come to my house, although I can travel to my students if they live not too far away from my area. If I need to use public transport I will need to add this cost, although my travelling time is free of charge. Another option would be remote lessons, using Skype and Zoom programs. Many of my students have found this both convenient and effective.
I provide prints of all the necessary materials for my students. If you students prefer actual books, I can refer them to the places where you can buy them.
Yes, I do. I use Skype and Zoom and many of my students have found remote learning to be very convenient and effective.
I prefer Zoom and find this really good for on-line lessons. It has lots of advantages, such as an online whiteboard and an ability to share your screen with your students to show videos and presentations.
Learning any foreign language requires dedication and energy. I would say the most difficult thing is to start learning new vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Once you have had a few lessons, and seen your first results, it gets more and more exciting and challenging in a good way.
Yes, there is a final control test at the end of each course which will help you to realise just how much progress you’ve made.
Throughout my practice I’ve had lots of students who didn’t feel comfortable enough when speaking a foreign language. In order to help them to overcome their fear, I try to create a relaxing and friendly atmosphere.
If my students are not comfortable in groups, they are always welcome to have individual classes instead where they will feel comfortable.
The most important thing for me as a teacher is to see my students speak. When we do speaking exercises, I usually write my students’ mistakes down in order to discuss them later. This way of correcting mistakes makes my students more relaxed because they are not interrupted while they are speaking.
Over the years I have developed and fine tuned my own 9 point plan to make our classes more effective. The 9 point plan includes:
• Speaking the language you learn every lesson
• Listening to engaging audio materials
• Learning how practical grammar works and how locals use it
• Expanding vocabulary every lesson
• Learning correct sentence building
• Reading fluently and confidently
• Learning how to communicate the way that locals do
• Learning to pronounce like the locals
• Building confidence in all the above using discussions and role-plays
Any language isn’t just about words. Let’s imagine a human’s body — skeleton, muscles and skin — now which one is more important in order to live? Without muscles we wouldn’t be able to lift things, without skin we wouldn’t be able to protect our body from viruses and infections. Without bones we wouldn’t be able to walk or run; etc.
Language grammar is a skeleton — the base which supports the body, whereas words or vocabulary are muscles which make the whole body work properly. The answer is — BOTH are essential.
It is and it’s not. There are lots of irregular verbs, tenses including both Active and Passive in English. There are significantly fewer tenses in Russian. Although, there are lots of endings for nouns and verbs in Russian depending on:
1. gender 2. tense 3. singular or plural forms etc.
There are a lot of rules and lots of exceptions as well which makes it all even harder to remember. Neither language’s grammar is easy to learn and the more effort you put into this the more you will benefit.
Yes, I can help you knock away most of the rough edges as I live in London and speak to locals every day. I can teach you the way the British pronounce words using great techniques like reading special texts and tongue twisters which help you train specific sounds. You can take pronunciation to extremes, e.g. there are even some British people who do accent training courses for locals.
I lived in Russia for 28 years before I moved to the UK. In addition to that, my mother tongue sounds completely different from English, e.g. it doesn’t have both long and short vowels like in English and the consonants sound pretty hard. For example, Russian-speaking students tend to see no difference between ‘heat’ and ‘hit’, or ‘bean’ and ‘bin’ — all these words sound the same because we have only one [i] sound in words like «пицца» «пить» «иголка» and it’s just a bit unnatural to a Russian speaker to use both [i:] and [i] RIGHT. That’s why you hear the Russians say ‘dreaaank’ instead of ‘drink’ and ‘peeeaaag’ instead of ‘pig’ It might take some time to start catching the difference and saying the right vowel in words but nothing is impossible.
All you need is the motivation to learn. All you need to do is contact me to arrange your first free lesson, which will help me to make an individual assessment and start tailoring your lessons to you.
You will be given homework for practicing reading, grammar, writing and listening at home.
Ideally, you should spend about 1-2 hours at home, each week, learning a language. You should be reading books, watching films with subtitles, doing online tests and also speaking with fluent people if you can.
This is a hard question because it varies with both the individual and their objectives. The short answer is it will take how long it needs to take. If you are a beginner, you’ll be introduced the new world of a language, which takes time to get used to.
Most of my beginner students have to start with learning an alphabet. This is a very important step — you either start loving the language or you think it’s a bit too difficult for you because of the new sounds, grammar and words. Dedication is the key to your OWN success. At first learning can be a bit tricky, yes.
However, as soon as you start noticing your progress, you spread your wings and you will want to learn more and more. It works in the same way for any learning process whether it’s woodworking, salsa classes or doll making.