Simurgh School is a small language school in Kartal, on the Asian side of Istanbul, and online. We teach English — from the first words to IELTS band 7 and beyond — and the languages of the people who come through our door: Turkish, Persian, Arabic, German, French, Spanish and Mandarin.

We are small on purpose. Every class is capped at ten, and most are eight, because a language is learned by speaking it and nobody speaks in a room of thirty. A course runs for a fixed number of sessions with one teacher, on the same evenings each week, so you know exactly what you are signing up for and when it ends.

Our teachers are specialists, not generalists. The IELTS courses are taught by an examiner-trained teacher who marks every essay line by line; German is taught for the Goethe exams by a teacher who has prepared engineers and doctors for them; Persian by a native speaker who will also teach you the script in a fortnight. You can read about each of them, and see what their students said, on their own page.

If you are not sure which course is yours, book a trial lesson. It is one session with the teacher you would have, at their real pace, and it costs nothing to find out. After it, the teacher will tell you honestly which level to join — including when the answer is “not this one yet”.

The school is named for the Simurgh, the bird of Persian legend that is found only by those who set out to look for it together. That is more or less how we think of a class.