I saw there have been some threads about this topic, but I would like to learn the fresh experiences of the people who experience(d) intensive German course recently. Course schedule can be everyday but half day only and in the mornings. Of course this has to be chekcked with the school but which course is good at that?
Thanks a lot for help..
The class I am in is every Monday and Wednesday, 18:00 to 20:00.
Intensive classes are 8.30-11.45 M-F, a weekly test every Friday. When things are too difficult, you can always go back to a slower class, the other way as well: when things are not challenging enough, you can apply to join a faster class(every time you jump, you jump 3 weeks, as classes are 3 weeks' progress apart from each other), provided 1)your teacher confirms that you are consistently better than your colleagues and 2)you pass the weekly tests of the weeks that you are trying to jump over.
EB Zurich is a pretty good school as well and they have decent prices.
I did three months there and there's really nothing good I can say about that school.
First of all, the staff is really, really unfriendly! At one point they almost wanted to force me to subscribe for the next course and because I didn't the secretary (she might even be the boss) got really rude and insulted me!
They also charged me 9Fr. for a simple confirmation!! What a rip off!
Other negative points:
-The two teachers I had were really awful. They kept talking for hours and none of the students understood anything.
-They have lots of courses on their webpage that didn't ever take place! It's all bullshit. Also activities they mention on their website, like movie-night, excursions etc. don't even exist.
-Their equipment (projectors, cd-players) are really old and not working half of the time.
-They don't even have Wi-Fi Internet! So don't even bring your tablet computer.
My experience at ALemania was so awful, that I just want to advise everybody not to go there.
I will try alpha now.. can't possibly be worse than Alemania in any way..
I found a private teacher, having lessons via Skype, passed A1 with sehr gut ( 97 out of 100 )and looking forward to pass A2 Prufung in December.
Bellingua is, without doubt, the best language school in Zurich, in that you are guaranteed to learn and improve a lot in a given time frame. This is, however, achieved only with a lot of (hard) work from your side as the student. One is assessed (by tests) regularly and will be moved to a lower level class should the test result is unsatisfactory. Bellingua is not cheap, but you'll learn efficiently. Can you find teachers equally good elsewhere? Yes, of course, but that depends on luck, whereas Bellingua can guarantee you a certain standards of your teacher/learning.
ZHAW and EB would be your second best bet - reasonably priced with proper qualified teachers. You won't be pushed though (just like in most other adult learning settings), so you'll need to motivate yourself.
Otherwise, there are many other schools in Zurich and with those schools, it's very difficult to give any general, overall recommendation as the quality of the teachers often varies widely.
I also made very good experience in EB Zürich, where I passed courses from A2 to B1. Teachers are very good and I learned a lot in a quite motivating class and very nice atmosphere. And they have many different kind of courses - standard, intensiv, semi-Intensiv, conversation, writing, ...! It is a very good quality and a good price.
At Sprachwelten, we had a very small group of 4 students, so there was a lot of personal attention and a lot of opportunity to speak - something that big schools with 20 people in one class don't have. I wish I had found it sooner - I would certainly have found it a lot easier to absorb the basic grammar.