Polina Kudriavtseva

Hello, learner of Russian!

My name is Polina! I tutor Russian online to make your communication with Russian friends, colleagues, clients and partners better and easier. The focus is on enhancing your Listening and Speaking skills (of course, grammar is included). Check my website and Facebook page. I post useful materials to learn Russian there.

Doesn’t Russian seems to be unlearnable from time to time? All that “strange” sounds, symbols and structures! Why on earth do they speak and write this way? I had a similar feeling learning Chinese, especially during first several months. And I don’t want to convince you, Russian is the easy language. Well, it is… for speakers of other Slavic languages.

But I can help you to understand and “feel” its logic, to make the learning process easier and more enjoyable. But how?

• First of all, you will speak Russian a lot during the lesson. You want to speak Russian, so that it is exactly what you will do most of the time. Writings and long videos/audios will be your home task, in order to free up more time for speaking.
• In the beginning we will discuss your learning goals and check, which aspects of Russian may cause difficulties. According to these knowledge I will develop your individual learning plan and choose or prepare materials that suit it best.
• Then, I will plan lessons based on the Storytelling approach. This means that a lesson won’t be just read-ask-answer-exercise, but a small story, an episode of life. It is interesting and helps to remember, isn’t it?
• As a professional teacher I know the way foreigners look at Russian language. Most Russian native speakers won’t explain you, why do they use this or that case. They just use it, because “that is how we speak”. Even gender of a noun native Russian and a foreigner will detect in a different way.
• If you just start to learn Russian I will explain serious things in English and translate important words to English, so that you were comfortable and sure, that you got it write. Later, I will step by step reduce the amount of English, until you are ready to learn entirely in Russian.

I teach Russian Language since 2015. During this time I mostly worked with Moscow expats, including diplomats. I always do my best to help my learners to progress in Russian. And I constantly look for new effective methods and approaches to teaching: take courses for teachers offline and online, read special literature and blogs, try to learn more about the world in order to have more interesting topics to discuss, improve my skills in technology.

One of my diplomat students at school started to take lessons regularly, though he was considered as irregular student by the school staff before. And he already understood Russian mass media in about half of a year. Another student realized during our first lesson, that he benefits more with my challenging task (he called it “difficult for a foreigner” at the beginning of that lesson). And one more student was really surprised to talk about all the things he deals with daily. It turned out to be his first time to speak about things, that really mattered to him.