Congratulations to our evening language course winner! July-October 2011

At Cactus we have come to the end of another term of evening courses, and are delighted to have chosen the winner of our feedback questionnaire prize. This is awarded to the person who we feel has given us the most useful and structured feedback, upon completion of their course, and the prize is a refund of their course fees or a free continuation course.

Our winner this term is Katie Webster Gomes, who took a Level 1 10-week evening course in European Portuguese at our centre in Soho, London, with teacher Fernando Almeida e Costa. Katie has chosen a refund of her course fees as she had already enrolled on and started her continuation Level 2 Portuguese course.

Here is what Katie said about her course:

“I chose Cactus because it was the only European Portuguese class that I could find when searching on the internet for classes. I enjoyed the course; it was good to meet new people and I have found it has really improved my Portuguese.

I found the majority of the content to be useful, or a good refresher of what I already knew. I found some things irrelevant, like learning metaphors that contained body words – even when saying them to my Portuguese husband, he said they were barely used, so I think these are certainly not relevant to beginners.

The teacher was good at encouraging role plays, and we all got to speak a lot due to the class size. I feel I have made a lot of progress and I am now able to say more to my husband and in-laws.”

Language learning resources that I found useful… The textbook from the course was useful, as was Google Translate for learning new vocabularly. The most useful resource I have found is “Earworms”, an audio CD where you learn phrases to music. I found that the new phrases I learnt really embedded in my head.

I really enjoyed… The whole experience! I enjoyed learning new words and phrases each week and meeting new people. I also liked having homework each week as it re-inforced what we learnt each week.

I didn’t like… The speed and amount we covered in Level 1. I think it is too much to cover in only 10 weeks and therefore I sometimes felt confused about what we covered in class and found it difficult to apply to the homework.

“Cactus language courses are a good way to motivate yourself to learn another language. They provide a good structure, as you have a weekly class and homework to reinforce what you learnt, which provides you with the essenitals and constant exposure to the language to allow you to quickly pick up new vocab and phrases.”

Thank you Katie; we will take all your points into consideration and wish you all the best for your continuation Level 2 course!

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