Sorry Alliance Française of Toronto but you felt like such a fraud.

Next week is going to be my last session of the series of semi-private lessons I took through Alliance Française and quite frankly, I think I am not going. Both my friend, who attended these classes with me, and I are quite shocked with lack of organization and awful teaching skills AF promoted. I still might give it a shot in group classes on a different campus but my friend feels like she had enough and is not planning to give AF a second chance.

These are just things to consider if you want to try AF. Do take into account that our experience was, as any first time experience, very subjective. However, you should also realize that both my friend and I have studied other foreign languages and both have higher expectations for the instructors than an average first-time learner, we also know what qualities an instructor must posses so that the language acquisition experience would turn out to be a positive one:

• Language test: mine was completely informal (conversation), my friend’s was very formal (conversation + written test). We got placed at the same level, which looked highly suspicious – we do have different backgrounds in French, and our strengths and weaknesses are very different. The chance of us getting exactly the same level was highly improbable.
• Levels: you are not allowed to skip levels, even if the group classes at your level are not offered at the particular location. However, they are more than willing to strike a deal with you: in our case it was taking 10 hours of semi-private lessons in order to cover the material of the level (normally 24 hours of group instruction) so that we can finish in time to register for the next level. Your level is not transferable between campuses – you always need to write a new knowledge test.
• Staff: the staff is not very engaging – they don’t seem to be able to explain clearly the study options available to you, nor do they seem to be knowledgeable about when is the campus head at the office. See, they actually lied to me on one occasion (really hope that was not intentional) about the campus head not being on the premises, while I actually got hold of her on the phone in her office a few seconds later. By the same token, they really don’t care at all why you stop taking classes.
• Profs: AF seem to be obnoxiously proud that none of their profs are from Quebec. Yet they fail to see that some of their “real” profs that came from “real” French speaking countries aren’t really all that good. I think on average 40-70 minutes of our two hour class was lost to doing nothing, grace à our “real” professor.