Alina Zelinska

Over the past year, Alina has been an exceptional mentor and guide, going far beyond traditional teaching. She has helped me build language-learning software engineering applications and played a pivotal role in translating Management in Times of War from Ukrainian to English. Thanks largely to Alina's efforts, this important work is now available in English, with the sequel and second edition due to be published in the coming months. Alina’s approach is the perfect blend of kindness and compassion, paired with discipline and focus when it comes to studying Ukrainian. She is incredibly patient, especially when helping me piece together sentences, ensuring I truly understand and improve. Beyond her expertise, Alina has been a trusted advisor, offering thoughtful guidance and encouragement in all areas of my life. I cannot recommend her highly enough to anyone seeking not just a teacher, but a dedicated, compassionate, and inspiring mentor.

Best teacher ever! Every lesson is very useful and informative! Great trusting atmosphere, individual approach and excellent explanation of materials of any difficulty! Thank you! =)

I worked more on endings of words, which were quite difficult, but getting the hang of it, also working on adjectives in different cases!

Alina is incredibly patient with newbies (such as myself) and provides a highly welcoming and calm approach to learning Russian. I learn new things every single lesson and I feel very confident in her teachings. She is a highly gifted instructor and I would recommend her to anyone wanting to learn the Russian language.

Today, we covered seven verbs. I had to read in Ukrainian, the translate, then come up with a sentence of my own with each of the words using Ukrainian. Then Alina read me a paragraph one, then again with me translating as she read. Then she showed me the same paragraph in English and I had to translate into Ukrainian. We spent the rest of time in conversational Ukrainian talking about my week and what I did.

Alina is great - a very knowledgeable and positive teacher. She asked me lots of questions to help develop my Ukrainian conversational skills and I'm very excited to continue my lessons with her.