Mwalimu Tina

I love learning with Mwalimu Tina because our learning together is engaging & relevant for how natives speak colloquial Kiswahili. She’s helped me learn the language in context by using fun stories! When Tina sees a concept that I need more reinforcement with such as prepositional phrases or negating, she’ll assign exercises that target those skills directly. Tina adapts her instruction effortlessly during the lesson by slowing down, jumping ahead, or referencing previous examples as needed. She makes a plan with her learners of how they’d like to approach their language journey & helped me find other tools to practice my Kiswahili. She’s also checked in between our lessons & invited me to try fun little challenges such as recording myself in Kiswahili on various topics! Tina is incredibly kind & she relates to how I’ve felt being surrounded at home by an unfamiliar language— all this is why mpenzi wangu (my Tanzanian partner) & I both think Tina is the best Kiswahili teacher for me!🇹🇿💛

Mwalimu Tina is the best Swahili teacher on italki, and I’ve worked with multiple teachers just to confirm. The major difference is that she has learned Kiswahili as an adult!Most others instructors that learned as children cannot relate to being an adult learner. She uses lots of different learning aids to teach with. Other people are just trying to have a conversation with you, or worse, asking you to lead the sessions… That’s what the teacher is for! They aren’t proactively providing teaching plans customized to your level like she is. Mwalimu Tina gives textbooks, reading assignments, recordings for pronunciation practice and even chats in between sessions to help make sure you have all parts of the language learning toolkit at your disposal. The materials really aid study and enable the student to be self empowered between sessions. That really gives you a sense of control as a student so you can feel like you’re actually making progress and not just randomly chatting.

Tina is a great teacher/tutor. She has an incredible understanding of Swahilli and for native English speakers, she can unlock the language by providing them with the right materials and conversations to help the student quickly focus on learning th things that drives fluency. Tina is a great resource to build towards my first goal which is to achive fluency. For those considering getting help in the language journey, I would highly recommend Tina.

Learning English with Tina is really easy and fun! I always feel free to ask her lots of questions (even stupid ones) about grammar and she is always there for me. She is helping me so much to improve my communication skills and we also have a lot of laughs. As I have some gaps, our lesson is divided into both grammar and conversation parts, it's never boring and I can't wait for the next one!

I always enjoy our lessons with Tina. One thing that I was worried about is that we would run out of topics for discussion, but that’s never been the case with Tina. She always makes sure that there is enough interesting content to have a look at and share our opinions. I like that she has experience of learning foreign languages, and knows a lot about the struggle of learning and best practices to improve. She is very professional and has an eye for detail when it comes to pointing out mistakes. With her I’ve learned about some areas that I could work on. Additionally she listens to my needs and, whenever possible, brings to my attention and breaks down some grammar points that might be of my interest

Tina is a great teacher. She frequently follows up with contents for further reading about the subject we cover in our last classes. Additionally, she quickly adapts her class to better address the learning point we're covering at the moment. That means to me that she's really interested in the student's learning process. By having had classes with her for a couple weeks now, I do mean that! I do recommend Tina as an English teacher!