My personal experience with a particular language centre.
I have been learning french for about three months.
When I first went looking around for a language centre, my main concern was finding a place which could teach me the language fast. I only have one year, and honestly, I didn’t merely want to know a few words in the french vocabulary. I wanted to be able to speak a decent amount of the language within that one year.
I started searching for language centres which could offer me french language courses. I realized that a lot of them, however, would take at least one and a half years to allow me to speak the amount of french I intended to learn. Finally, I had a friend introduce me to a french teacher named Daniel Kermorvant; and I am proud to say that in the three months he has taught me I was amazed with the amount of french I was able to speak.
For all you gappers out there who intend to learn a language fast, this is the guy to go to. What I really loved about Daniel’s classes was his emphasis on gaining confidence to be able to speak the language, whether or not is was completely grammatically correct. His teaching philosophy is what impressed me most; once you are confident of speaking the language, it is much easier to improve on your grammar. Why bombard a new learner with grammatical principles and rules to intimidate him or her with the language? I found this technique very interesting an decided to hop on board.
What you will immediately notice during your first class is his strong french accent. It is so amusing! Every one in my class agreed it was on of the best things in class. Here we have this animated, fun and oh-so-typical french person teaching us french! It was quite an interesting experience. But once things got running, we knew he meant business. Daniel’s focus on speech and pronunciation of the french language rather than getting the grammar and spelling absolutely right allowed us to speak from the first class onwards. True enough, by slowly giving us more and more words to create our own sentences, we grew more curious and eager to learn more. Our classes soon became very animated as all of us started conversing and interacting with each other in french, laughing at our mistakes and congratulating ourselves when we got it right. Currently, our class is able to describe ourselves, our family, our home and our friends as well as ask basic questions. All in three months. Would I say I know enough french to survive in France? Probably not. But I still have a few more months to go, and by the way things are looking, I think I just might be able to.