Cactus Staff Review: French Language Course in Brighton

Sebastian Clemens, intern for Cactus Language, tells us about his 10-week French Language Course in Brighton.

I studied French for three years at school but never had the opportunity to put into practice what I had learned as I have never visited France. So a language course with Cactus seemed like the perfect opportunity to brush up on my knowledge and skills. I did not remember much from school so I decided to take a Beginner 2 French class, which turned out to be a good decision for me as the level was neither too high nor too low.

After revising some of the basics of the French language like the alphabet, personal pronouns and grammar structures, the whole class was surprisingly quick at forming sentences and because of this my confidence grew when speaking in just a few hours of the course.

I think one of the reasons for my quick progress was due to the full immersive teaching method used. I believe this is the best feature because instead of translating words into English, the teacher explains, illustrates and describes language structures and words in French, helping the class understand and remember more. It is a lot of fun once you get used to this method and feels much more effective when learning a language.

The lessons lasted for two hours and time usually flew by with speaking, listening and writing exercises. There were occasional games and the lessons never felt boring and every week was a mixture of gaining new knowledge and revising what we had learnt in our previous lessons.

The homework helped me to keep track of the content covered in the last lesson as I found that sometimes it was hard to keep track of my progress, particularly because I am working and found I did not have a lot of time to revise.

I find that I still struggle with understanding spoken French on the radio or TV, but definitely hope I can continue some studying the French language on my own in the future.

If you would like to follow in Sebastian’s footsteps and take a French language course, then Cactus offer a variety of courses throughout the UK, US and in France.