Following on our Russian series of articles, we hare happy to host a featured blog post by Luka Boyle, a 2nd year ML and Economics student. You can read the first article of the series here.
During term two, our Level 3 group had the opportunity to partake in a Russian language speaking club with a student native speaker. The importance of speaking a language with a native speaker to aid with learning and fluency is very significant, not just for exam performance, but also for general consolidation and to take a step further towards an ability to use self-intuition when expressing an idea, opinion or anything else. Bearing this in mind, I made sure to attend all sessions, which were conveniently scheduled before my Friday Russian seminar.
Our native speaker was a second year PPE student called Saida, who is originally from Uzbekistan but is currently residing in Austria outside of university terms. With us having not just age in common but also several modules, we found it very easy to converse with each other. Her enthusiasm to prepare a comprehensive presentation for each seminar is something we all appreciated. A WhatsApp group was created to discuss timings and topics and she encouraged us heavily to make suggestions for her so she could tailor the sessions to our interests.
When we met for the first session, she made sure we all understood her and she made it clear we should ask her to slow down in the event she was talking too fast. Fortunately, this did not transpire to be a problem and she always stopped after each slide to go through any words or phrases that were new to us. As such, the new vocabulary, culture and information that we received from Saida was fantastic. We discussed various topics covered throughout the year, including social media and its implications, historical and cultural insights, music, her homeland of Uzbekistan, Russian writers and poets, and more.
Saida is a genuinely friendly and enthusiastic club leader with whom we all got along very well, and we are all grateful for her help and input. Our speaking club continued during the Easter vacation, this helped us not only to prepare for the oral Russian language exam, but also to consolidate the speaking skills that we had practised in lessons during this academic year.
University of Warwick | School of Modern Languages and Cultures 