Amandine wrote:They're not live classes. The videos are recorded and everything is laid out. I believe the enrolments are limited because he and his assistant are involved in the community answering questions and etc and so the numbers need to be manageable.
The idea is one per day for a month but I found them too much (in a good way) to really do it at that pace. I did one every two or three days. Basically they are longer versions of his normal videos with transcripts and grammar/vocab notes. Then a grammar lesson with another video on a particular issue and several quizzes on that topic. There are also "missions" which were usually writing about a certain topic in the community, I never really engaged in this but it looked very active. At some point I will go back and review the grammar stuff and relisten to the audio of the main lessons.
If I may ask, where do you think this course took you from/to? And how much do you feel you were just doing yourself compared to being actually 'taught'. What I mean is: what's different between the grammar he gives and the same presented in e.g. a coursebook?
I have nothing against this Hugo fellow, he seems a decent sort to me, though I'm quite interested in the way they are all doing this online. I use YouTube quite a bit and because I'd never actively searched for French learning content (because I didn't need it) I didn't realise just how much of it is on there...it's all popping up in my sidebar now! I saw another one called
Comme une française. Though she seems to only talk in English in the videos, she also runs online courses and these also seem to be pre-recorded material. At €199-€399 a pop and the numbers of students they claim it looks rather lucrative.
Pre-recording probably isn't that bad, after all the audio of most courses is pre-recorded and in the 80s/90s video material for languages courses was like luxury. However the impression given with these courses seems to be that you have a 'personal teacher', but this is surely not the case? If they end up with something like 1000+ students signing up (and this must be the case with French which is always popular), how could they possibly manage to properly assess each one?
Does anyone have any other experiences mirroring this for other languages? Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese?