A bit about me
TEACHER
15+ years
1:1 & groups
children & adults
A1–C1 & native speakers
online & in person
immersive & academic
LANGUAGE LEARNER
🇷🇺 Russian · native
🇬🇧 English · C1
🇩🇪 German · C1
🇮🇹 Italian · B2
🇫🇷 French · A1
TEACHER TRAINER
& EXAMINER
teacher training & supervision
materials development
TORFL examiner (A1–B1)
PhD RESEARCHER
at the University of Innsbruck
Thesis: "The Story Method in Foreign Language Grammar Acquisition: A Quasi-Experimental Study"
Full professional background → LinkedIn
It started with silly associations
Long before I knew what the keyword method was, I was already using it with my students at Exlinguo Language Centres in Novosibirsk and St Petersburg. I loved inventing funny, concrete associations based on how words sounded, simply because I noticed that those were often the words students remembered best.
When I moved to London and started working at the RLC, I could no longer rely on the luxury of the immersion programme that my students had back in Russia. In the UK, Russian existed for most of them for just one hour a week. They would leave the classroom and dive straight back into their busy lives. So I began looking for even better ways to give their memory the extra support it needed.
Then I had to step into my students' shoes
In 2018, I moved from the UK to Austria, and suddenly it was me who needed to reactivate a language, and fast. Despite having a C1 certificate in German, I hadn’t used the language much for years and felt like I had forgotten everything. Luckily, I stumbled upon Peter Heinrich’s mnemonic materials. They helped me bring my vocabulary back quickly and (this part felt almost like magic) helped me finally understand some of those stubborn grammar topics I could never master before. But what fascinated me most was discovering the academic research behind those memory strategies.
And I just had to know why
Why do they work? And, more generally, how does memory actually work when we learn a language? Why do some words and rules stick while others disappear? How can we influence what we remember and what we forget? And where are the limits? These questions kept burning in my head, so I started a PhD at the University of Innsbruck to find the answers.
Over the years, I’ve read more research papers than I care to count and conducted my own experimental study using the mnemonic story method to teach irregular grammar. And somewhere along the way, I realised I didn’t want everything to stay in academic journals. I created MnemoLing to share these discoveries and help language learners make better decisions about how they learn.
Wish me luck, as I’m now writing up the results and wrapping up my research. This final part is definitely not my favourite :) Stay tuned for updates, and if any of this sparks your curiosity too, I’d love to hear from you.
Let’s stay in touch
Have a question, an idea, or something you’d like to discuss?