Natasha has been teaching Russian to foreigners for over 20 years, first in Ukraine and then in the USA. She has a Bachelor’s in Linguistics and a Master’s Degree. Natasha attended a number of teaching trainings, conferences, and seminars. Before her career as an author, Natasha was a head teacher and observed countless lessons, giving feedback to the teachers about how to improve the lesson, as well to the students on how to benefit the most from the program.
Natasha watched many students struggle with learning Russian via complex textbooks that present a lot of material quickly and without allowing the student time to internalize the new information. She quickly started developing her own way of presenting the materials and realized that there is a very simple way to learn any language: just by dividing something complicated into simple pieces and mastering the language step-by-step.
Her many years of work and experience culminated in a book series of her own – Russian Step by Step (RSBS). These books are easy to follow and, at the same time, are teaching real Russian. In RSBS books students will find dialogues from everyday life, exercises to help master those dialogues, and texts to help in remembering them and lots of audio.
The series has two branches: adult and children’s books.
The adult series is aimed to non-Russian speakers who want to learn it for any reason by themselves or with a teacher. Many hours of audio that comes with the course books allow the student to pick up the correct Russian pronunciation, improve their listening and comprehension and to accelerate their learning process (russianstepbystep.com)
The children’s series is aimed to bilingual kids, kids who want to learn Russian as a Foreign Language and kids who are heritage learners and their parents/grandparents want them to be able to not only understand but communicate in Russian. The books take into consideration the specifics of this audience and make sure the kids have fun while learning (russianstepbystepchildren.com)
This blog post is by Anna Watt