Experience Summary
I love learning languages, and I have lots of experience living overseas. A California native, I lived in Russia for two years where I studied and used the language every day. After coming back, I studied Arabic in college and lived in the Middle East for seven months, where I learned Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial dialects. I am not a native speaker in either of these languages, but I think that makes me even more qualified to teach them to beginners--I know what you're going through!
Teaching Style
I am a firm believer that the best way to learn a foreign language is to "consume" as much of it as you can, in as many formats and media as you can get your hands on. So when teaching a language, I try to find samples of the language from a variety of sources, from pop songs to television shows to newspapers and famous poems. I also have a strong background in the underlying grammar of Russian and Arabic, and I use metaphors to clarify these sometimes tricky topics.