Alliance Française de Toulouse

Expérience fantastique: I have just finished up an intensive course here and I cannot recommend it enough. My instructor, Sarah, was the best French professor that I have ever had (and I've been studying and then subsequently forgetting French on and off for 14 years)! We had a lot of opportunity to practice speaking skills and Sarah was great at adapting to her students. If she could tell that there was a grammatical skills that we couldn't quite understand we'd spend extra time on it. She also had a lot of creative games and activities to get us to practice vocabulary and oral expression. I have to leave Toulouse but I hope to take more classes online with AFT!

Expérience fantastique: Super école ! Le meilleur endroit pour apprendre le français à Toulouse !!

Expérience fantastique: I just finished a 2-week class at the Alliance Française de Toulouse. It was a great experience: very fulfilling, fun, and interesting. Our teacher, Pauline, was amazing. She was enthusiastic, hard-working, fun, and very good at teaching the language and at keeping the students always engaged and interested. She provided us with a lot of extra information and additional material, and went above and beyond the program in a way that didn't make us feel overwhelmed. The students were all great to be around and to work with, and I feel that in just two weeks (9 days, as August 15th was a holiday) I've made a lot of progress!

Expérience fantastique: My experience doing a two-week intensive course at AF Toulouse was excellent. Eric's teaching was engaging, clear and enjoyable. I thought his technique of having students work on problem sets two-by-two was particularly good, because it got us talking French to one another. As a U.S. retiree learning French for fun, I valued meeting the mostly younger, motivated students from many countries, who are learning because they want to live and work in France. The afternoon phonetics workshop was also fun and valuable, and I found the folks who run the program friendly and helpful. The school is located in a quiet area of the city, without much else to do in the immediate vicinity, but with easy access from the metro.

Expérience négative: Such a sombering experience. Don’t do it to yourself, there are much better ways to learn French. The one star is for Eric, he might be the only professor that is good in his role. They expect you to come already knowing French and will hand out random worksheets then talk for a few hours. Not an interactive or constructive experience. The rest of the experience involved dealing with biased professors who believed bullying is a method of instruction and would single out students from a particular background. An Australian friend I met in class mentioned « Wow, Gaëlle really is tough on you but don’t worry, that’ll make you better than the rest of us at this. » It was the same with Valerie. The anxiety of going to class blocked out a lot of the material after a while. I shouldn’t have to put up with that when I’m paying money to be taught. I guess the respect is sold separately.