A little nerve-racking at first

The next challenge was to find the most effective way to learn my chosen language. I started by downloading lots of apps, but they proved to be either repetitive and boring, or scattered with unintentional errors that could hamper my progress, or worse still – both. So I switched to the old fashioned method of picking up a textbook. But again, I found myself struggling as they often contained complicated grammatical explanations that I didn’t understand, and obviously provided no help for my speaking and listening skills, so a better approach was needed. That’s when I discovered Verbalplanet.

The first time I logged on to Verbalplanet I was genuinely amazed. There, on this website I’d found via a search engine, were hundreds (if not thousands) of tutors that taught most of the languages under the sun. Not only that, unlike other websites I’d stumbled across, finding a tutor for my requirements seemed easy as I could quickly filter by their location, cost, and most importantly for me, their native language. Perfect. I began trawling through all of the native Russian-speaking tutors listed, diligently reading the verified feedback left by previous students on the lesson quality, and started requesting learning plans to see if my goals could be met. When I thought I’d found a tutor, I booked a trial lesson and that’s when my learning really started to accelerate.

My trial lesson with Liliya (my tutor) was a little nerve-racking, as I hadn’t taken online classes before, I hadn’t spoken a word of Russian out loud, and to be honest, I was still struggling to remember some of the Cyrillic letters... had I done the right thing. Well, very quickly it became apparent the answer was "Yes". Liliya was absolutely fantastic as she helped me with pronunciation, explained things in a way that I could understand and relate to, and above all, was able to provide me with real-time feedback, something that had been lacking in all my previous methods of learning. As soon as the trial lesson had finished, I booked ten more lessons, as I was absolutely convinced from the get-go that learning through Verbalplanet was the most thorough and immersive approach available.

Quick Facts: Russian

The Russian language belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is the most widely spoken language of Eurasia and the most widespread of the Slavic languages. Within the Slavic family, Russian is one of three living members of the East Slavic group, the other two being Belarusian and Ukrainian.

While the Russian language preserves much of its common Slavonic word base, modern Russian exhibits a large stock of borrowed international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. A language of great political importance in the 20th century, Russian is one of the official languages of the United Nations and over 145 million people speak Russian as their first language worldwide.