Johnny speaks' Guestbook

Hi Kathy, I'm really glad you liked the blog. I learned a ton at EF, but I'm not sure if it's worth the price. The problem I had with it was that each individual school doesn't really communicate with the department you talk to at home (so for me the US offices and for you it'd be the Australian offices). The offices outside of the school don't really know what's going on in the schools and couldn't give me much accurate information. Also the living conditions weren't very good, I was moved 5 times, which is kind of a pain when you're there for (semi) long term. The "EF residences" were actually just hostels and the beautiful buildings advertised in the brochure were only in select cities. The best thing about EF for me in comparison to other schools was that almost all the students were around my age. The average was 19-22 years old. So as I said I did learn a lot, but the accommodations really weren't worth how much I payed. And also the communications between corporate EF and the schools: corporate EF requires that all the teachers be native speakers of the target language, but this school had no problem giving us teachers from Asia for German classes. It's just a problem that the corporation doesn't check up on their schools and give the customers accurate info. If you have any more questions about anything I'd love to help! Send me your email if I can help in anyway. Take care.

Re:
Beata and Tomek - close, they the white ones are called Clumber Spaniels and the brown are called Welsh Spaniels MJ - Thanks MJ! We'd love to meet you both too. I'll see if I can make that happen. They have cheap tickets every once in a while. We were going to try to go to LA for Mia's birthday (we ended up changing it to NYC, because there's not much for public transport in L.A. Seeing as we're both 19 and can't rent a car yet), but San Francisco would be even better! By the way I see you had a great time in Mexico! Show us what San Fran looks like when you get there, I'll look forward to the blog

RE: Brittany
Hi Brittany, I'm glad my story inspired you to learn more languages. Japanese is a really difficult language, I admire the motivation you have to learn it. Why did you pick an exchange program in Japan? As for Dutch, Italian, Arabic, and all the others I started, there's a couple reasons I haven't yet continued. The first reason is that when you're teaching yourself so many languages at the same time, sometimes it can get in the way of becoming fluent in one. I couldn't practice that much at home (in the US not many people speak more than English) so I picked some of my favorites to concentrate in for now, then I'm planning on going back to some of the others later. Another reason is that I already learned a lot of French and a lot of German, Italian is closely related to French (Romance language) and Dutch is extremely close to German. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I want to learn at least one language for each continent (other than English and excluding Antarctica haha). Asian languages interest me a little bit more than European and I like the challenge. So that's why I haven't pursued some of the others more. My German and French are about good enough now though that I'll probably start a new one soon :) Good luck with your language learning! And tell me if you need any advice, materials, or motivation!