Learning Greek in London – evening courses or a private tutor?

Many Greek schools in London run weekend or evening courses- but does classroom based language tuition really work?

No, in my opinion it doesn’t. Many students come to us after having first enrolled for a Greek course in one of the many Greek schools and language centres across London. They tried to learn the language in a classroom environment but failed. Why is that?

Are you one of those students who feels frustrated after months or years of trying to learn Greek in evening classes, who has invested money and lots of time, and still doesn’t see any satisfactory results, if any at all?

Lets think why classroom based Greek lessons don’t really work very well.

The main purpose of a language is communication, speaking in particular. I strongly believe learning a language is about understanding well the learning process but more importantly about speaking and practising a lot and unfortunately in a classroom environment students don’t get to speak very much at all. This is the main reason, in my opinion (and from my own experience), why classroom tuition doesn’t work.  You can most certainly learn a lot ABOUT the language in the classroom but not to SPEAK the language.

A much better option is private classes, unless you are an experienced language learner and feel confident enough to learn Greek on your own, by self-study. At London Language Studio we promote both of these methods and strongly believe in their efficiency. (We talk more about self-taught methods in our Language Learning Tips section.)

Private language classes offer a great combination of the tutor’s professional help and guidance and the opportunity to speak, the combination of which can make any good private lesson very intense but also very efficient. The downside of private language tuition is the cost, although relative to how much you can learn in each lesson the overall investment can be much better value than paying for a classroom based course.

Finally, when learning Greek, Italian, or any other language, the success of any type of learning method is very much down to the tutor’s teaching skills and the student’s commitment and language motivation. Without the student’s hard work, no language method will work and no amount of money will be able to buy fluency and confidence.