Speaking Russian Elvira IVANOVA

This podcast is the very best anywhere..
I’m also an autodidact living in Germany and Canada...
And started a few months ago to want to learn Russian proficiently...
I looked at quite a few podcasts - from UCLA to Moscow - to Duolingo and YouTube etc.almost all of them disappointing.. (although YouTube has a few very goood ones)
Now I found Elvira...
I’m finally learning Russian...!!
And for the first time I’m beginning to form sentences and phrases with my Russian friends...
I also want to visit Russia...!!
Elvira - to say it again - is the very best...
And I thank the heavens she does the podcasts...
I will also write her on her email...
Rainier

I was looking for something I could use to get me up and running in Russian phraseology relatively quickly.

I'm basically an auto-didact in the language...my mother hails from the FSU but never spoke Russian with my sibling and I growing up (father wasn't Russian, so that explains things at least partially).

I was surrounded as a child by the language -- because my mother would speak a pidgin form of it with her own mom (90 years old this July 18th!) -- she left Russia when she was just a teen -- so I already had a bit of a base in the lingo. I'd also lived for a spell in the Czech Republic for six years, so I had the experience of another Slavic language under my belt and I'd taken many side trips to Belgrade, Serbia, while living there to visit friends and familiarize myself with the the home of the purest form of Slavic spoken today.

One day, it bothered the heck out of me that I couldn't read street signs there, and so I sat at a local cafe for approximately four hours studying Cyrillic characters until I could begin to mouth out the sounds on the streets signs (each language using Cyrillic has a slightly different set of characters, but the essentials are all there -- once you get the basics, you can teach yourself the rest).

Russian has been a bit more of a slower process for Yours truly...I keep imagining that I can get by in the language by a process of osmosis (I have a lot of Russian friends), but that particular methodology hasn't been entirely successful, admittedly. I keep making imbecilic errors that can basically be rectified with a proper -- more formal -- study approach to the language. And I was tired of being wrong all the time and -- worse! -- not comprehending the basics.

In Miami, I'm also planning on doing business in big Russian communities and while I can read all the signs and read texts, I can't assemble the words properly and I decided to put all that to an end recently. Hence this review...

Enter...Elvira's cast (ELVIRA = trustworthy, true)...and her stellar ability to mix up her repertoire with ultra slick editing -- which permits you to repeat the words and idioms she speaks and get your accent down-pat -- makes for an A-Class cast.

She incidentally has a very endearing accent in English with a slight British-Russian twinge (which I personally adore!) which makes listening to her all the more impactful and your lessons all the more satisfying.

The basic format for her lessons is:

-- her delivery of new information.

-- her repetition of the word or phrase twice or thrice.

-- her translation of the Information into English.

-- her repetition again...then pause for *you* to be able to utter it yourself.

I have become used to this kind of staccato beat and Elvira's methodology has now become my preferred format as I go around seeking other language pods -- I'm presently improving my rusty Spanish as well, which I'd learned in Montreal as a student at McGill University.

I speak:

-- English, French, Hebrew, and Czech well.

I understand very well:

-- Spanish.

I have familiarity with:

-- German and Italian.

...and I'd like to become proficient in Russian as quickly as I can...preferably by the end of 2016's autumn (northern hemisphere).

::: she might be wondering about the makeup/background of the people catching her pods :::

She does a stentorian job, and so far I've been going through ten episodes per day so that I don't stuff my brain banks.

But from what I've heard thus far, she is truly talented and a magnificent educator...proving once again that Russian teachers and professionals are of truly high intellectual profile and that said standards haven't declined from former Soviet times.

If she were near, I'd hire her as a personal tutor in a femtosecond.

-- ADM from Toronto (but with stops in Montreal and Miami)

was very good