Business People living in the U.K. really language training in a wide range of European languages to help them deal with customers who are multi-national. SGI Business Languages offers classes in four languages at centers all around the U.K.
You can find evaluation quizzes to help you determine your level
• French Assessment
• German Assessment
• Italian Assessment
• Spanish Assessment
Try them! It’s a good way to see how good your language skills are! The SGI solutions seem to be quite flexible with three different kinds of courses for students:
The intensive courses are similar to immersion courses. They are quite intensive courses, too, and depend very much on the concept of a ‘negotiated syllabus.’ In my experience, for people who can afford to focus intensively for short periods upto 40 hours a week, this may be an effective solution to polish, refine or add to existing language skills.
More flexible options are even more suitable for those students with a longer goal who perhaps can’t or don’t want to choose such an intensive course. Very much more suitable for busy professionals, the benefits of this type of course really accrue to students over the months. It is certainly an effective solution for students with longer time horizons, and helps to reinforce new language as well as keep existing skills under focus.
I’ve tried both kinds of programs for learning Chinese here, and I found both of them to be quite effective. The key of course to success in these programs though really is consistency. Language skills really need to be built up over longer stretches of time, as the brain needs to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into skills.
As an ELT teacher, this is the single lesson I have noticed in my students, over the last ten years.
