“ I started to learn Russian in 2016 when I noticed evening classes were being run for beginners in a nearby college in Rathmines where Irina taught Russian. I had visited St. Petersburg and had some Russian speaking friends and was very curious about the language and thought it would provide an interesting challenge. It is very rewarding to read and write using cyrillic and to begin to understand Russian pronunciation.

It is grammatically very different to English and I feel that the world is seen differently when presented through Russian. As I started to improve I continued to take classes with Irina at her Kalinka language school. She is very skilled at teaching the language and has an intuitive feel for a students capabilities and how to maintain their progress. ”