Online Resources

The message usually starts the same way. “He understands everything. He just doesn’t speak.” I teach Russian. This is my seventeenth year at a school in Irkutsk, in Siberia, and for about a year now I have also been teaching online — children from Russian-speaking families who are growing up in other countries. By the time a family finds me, something has usually already happened at home

I grew up in Germany as the child of immigrants, and for as long as I can remember, I lived between two worlds of language. At school and with friends, everything was in German. At home, my parents spoke their own language, and I understood every word. But for a long time, I mostly answered in German. Not because I didn’t know the other language, not because I didn’t care about it, but because understanding it and actually producing it felt like