bergesinstitutespanish.com

Okay Course - Much Potential Can Be Found

I have taken over ten online language classes from various schools in French, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian. I was looking forward to working with Berges on an efficient, cheap solution to learning Spanish. I loved working with the various teachers, especially Silvana, who kept the bland coursework interesting by offering her anecdotes and conversation practice for the first 10 minutes of each class. Berges uses the Graf Method, which is great for learning or re-learning the basics and practical grammar for Spanish. I felt the classes, unfortunately, mostly focused on grammar, even though conversation could be embedded in language learning. I understand Berges has conversation classes, but the Basic Course is only available if you are taking or have completed Level 4. The Units in the course are quite long and include a huge amount of grammar in each section that does not coincide with the grammar you learned in a previous unit. For example, in one unit, you learn the imperfect while learning a couple of adjectives, and at the same time, you know some adverbs, but in the homework later, you forget to incorporate those adjectives you learn. I felt the teachers sometimes felt this, and it would slow the other students down when they would ask mundane or erroneous questions that had nothing to do with the grammar at hand.Each class had various levels of Spanish learning per student (which is understandable), but many of the slower learners held the class back. I felt people taking a trial lesson disrupted the course more often, and I would've preferred they sit and watch when they were called. I felt the teachers did their best, and truly enjoyed working with one of them. In another class I worked with (I took Level 2 and Level 3 simultaneously), the teacher was sporadic and often replaced (a huge no-no in language learning) and was replaced by two teachers on multiple occasions before another teacher completely replaced him. You get used to learning with a certain teacher, and I understand things come up in people's lives, but I felt it was not handled appropriately.Then this comes to the actual homework and book itself. I honestly was not very impressed with the quality of Berges' book. I had ordered to have the physical book from Amazon, but before they put it on the website halfway through my course, I had no idea where to find it. When I received the book, it was damaged and felt very cheap. I also thought that the black-and-white utilitarianness of the book itself, with some units having more explanations and others having fewer, made it feel quite cheap. The homework also was a bunch of translations, which is good, but it's not that great when you ask for an answer key. They don't have one off hand in case you miss a class and would like to make up the homework because several sentences can be translated in many different ways. I also felt the homework was uninspired and uninteresting compared to other language class workbooks I've used.I won't get into the website as I've seen a major improvement since I started. Still, many Berges teachers do not mention the podcasts and other media available, which is a shame because it was very hard to find other media and materials for learning Spanish with Berges. Other teachers at different language schools knew of readily available workshops that Berges lacked. There should be more workshops outside of grammar and conversation that includes culture, happy hour, a book offer, or even doing yoga in Spanish.Overall, I think it's an okay language school that can learn much from student reviews. I have seen improvements with the website, and the staff, especially Victor and Silvana, were amazing with communication. I know much more progress can be made to distinguish Berges from other language schools, as I truly want to see Berges succeed with its great potential.

Date of experience: Oct 12, 2022