Russian: three different tasks and three different tutors

Behind the words «Russian tutor» hide three quite different jobs. The people who do them well are usually different people. Fail to tell the tasks apart at the start and you can spend half a year on the wrong one.

First: school and exams

The clearest of the three. The child is at school at home, an exam is coming, and what is needed is correct writing and an essay built the way the markers expect.

What matters here is not a love of the language but knowledge of how the marking works: what loses points, what is expected of an opening and a conclusion, how much time is left for a fair copy. A good exam tutor is half a coach.

Second: Russian for a child growing up abroad

Here everything is different, and parents often notice too late. The language leaves more quietly than you would expect: first the child's answers in Russian get shorter, then they answer in the language of school, then they stop reading. Understanding holds out longest — and that is exactly what misleads. «But he understands everything» — yes, he does. Speaking, reading and writing have already gone.

Writing goes first, reading next, speech last. Rebuilding runs in the opposite order and takes far longer than keeping it up would have.

What works: regularity beats length. Two short lessons a week do more than one long one. And a child needs a reason to speak the language beyond «because you must». A good tutor goes looking for that reason: books worth reading, conversations about what matters to the child rather than retellings from a textbook.

Ask outright whether the person has worked with children growing up outside the language. It is a skill of its own, and it does not follow from being good at exam preparation.

Third: Russian as a foreign language

An adult starting from nothing needs someone who can look at the language from outside. A native speaker finds cases hard to explain: they never learned them, they simply use them. «Why is it like that?» — «Because that is how we say it» — is not an explanation but a dead end.

Look for someone who says: I work with foreign learners. And ask which language they are willing to explain in at the beginning — with no foothold at all it can be heavy going.

All three work online

A screen is no obstacle to language: no laboratory and no instrument are needed. Both of you can see the text, write on it together, and read aloud all the more easily. For families abroad this is usually the only way to find a teacher at all.

How to read the reviews here

Reviews on this site are thank-yous, so read them not as a verdict but as an account of who this person works well with. «Two years in and he reads in Russian again» and «got her ready for the exam in six months» were written about different tutors — and that is as it should be.

See who is teaching Russian: Russian language tutors with reviews.