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There is a maximum of 9 students learning together in our classes. That way, every learner will have a say in group exercises, and our instructors will be able to give individual attention to each student.
For beginners, definitely. Our classes will engage you to be actively experimenting with the new language. Each session will exhaust you in a positive way. It is virtually impossible to keep going at that intensity for hours. So, you will have earned your break after class - and can do some review and preview activities at home to maximize your learning.
Students with learning differences have successfully participated in our courses. They found our method fun and accessible because it’s learner-centered and designed to accommodate a variety of learning styles. We offer a range of German input sources (audio, visual, written), lots of conversation, and some structured written tasks. We encourage you to let us know how we can best accommodate you when you register. While we are a small language school with limited resources, all our teachers do their very best to foster a supportive and inclusive learning environment.
Sixteen weeks of instruction. We suggest you think about your learning as a process, rather than counting individual sessions. After all, what you're looking for is to build up new cognitive structures. After the first four months you will have built up basic vocabulary and sentence structures and should feel more comfortable with German pronunciation. By the end of the second module, you will find yourself at the point of being able to put together your own sentences in a number of contexts, even if you had no previous knowledge of German whatsoever when you first visited LALIA.
Homework will take you about half an hour a day.
LALIA is strongly committed to the communicative approach. Everything we do is informed by this method, but two aspects might stand out the most: First of all, our teaching style. LALIA instructors are facilitators rather than the protagonists of each lesson. Grammar is not our main focus. Instead, we look at speaking from a pragmatic point of view. As a beginner, you will want to make yourself understandable. Accuracy is what we can work on later, once you have actually begun speaking. The second thing you will notice about LALIA is that we have good results. Our students learn fast, not because they are geniuses, but because we know how to facilitate their language learning well.
λαλιά is an Old Greek word. Originally, it used to mean something like gossip or common talk. Later on, however, it lost this negative meaning and started to denote speech, speaking, the act of talking, form of speech (and thus also dialect). This semantic shift from a negative to positive meaning symbolizes for us the transition from traditional learning methods that considered grammar or translation as a first priority to the modern learning method we use at LALIA: One that centers the act of speaking.