Learning a language: One to One tuition is best

So after a nightmare journey (major delays because of fog) my son finally came home for a week during the Russian Christmas/New Year holiday. I’ve persuaded him to give me daily half hour private tuition (well Ok the money helped with the persuasion!) I’ve really felt the benefit of having individual attention, being able to go at my pace, being able to direct the lesson where I wanted to go and have my questions dealt with promptly.

I enjoy learning online with Duolingo, RedKalinka and I enjoy working on my own with my Take off in Russian CD and book – and I very much enjoy our weekly classes with Svetlana and our weekly conversation classes with Anya. As someone who works each day from home  and whose work focuses on online education, I particularly appreciate being able the face to face contact I get from the weekly classes. It’s nice to share the learning with others and have some rapport. BUT in a mixed ability class you are dependent on the progress of others and the teacher always has to maintain a balance. Plus I guess I might be in a slightly different “camp” from the others, not because I speak other languages – several of them do – but because I know about teaching and learning languages and I know what I want to learn and how to learn it. Private tuition, one-on-one would suit me for a number of reasons. However it’s expensive. Even when it’s your own son!!! That’s the down side and why I probably won’t do it for a while yet. It’s something to consider for the future however. I am off to St Petersburg again in February and I plan to book a couple of stand alone private lessons with a school there which my son knows. Watch this space:)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *