Category: Pat ‘n’ Steph

Introduction

I recently took some German classes at UvA Talen in Amsterdam. I didn’t have a very good experience, and the purpose of this post is to share my opinions and experiences.

This was by far the worse language class I have ever taken.

I’m 55 years old, and was born in the US. I moved to Amsterdam when I was 25, after completing a US bachelor’s degree. That left me in a black hole as far as education here, and pursuing life-long learning. Education here is defined differently, very specific, targeted towards very particular qualifications, and is very much used to facilitate class division. For example there’s a program for studying English, getting a catering license, or to become a auto mechanic. There are only limited possibilities for someone who wants to craft their own study, or don’t know yet what they want to major in. Universities and similar institutes don’t usually offer classes to the general public, even to people with degrees. Some employers will organize classes, but I’ve never been able to make a lot of use of these.

Basically, what’s left is to learn languages. There are lots of private language institutes in Amsterdam. So, over the last 30 years, I’ve taken a lot of language classes. When I talk about ‘years’ of language classes, I’m referring to what’s generally 20-30 weeks, depending on how intensive, usually taught over a school year.

A secondary school (called high school in the US) will generally teach a language over 4 years, otherwise a language is normally learned in 3 years. If you pick up a language after several years of not using it, it’s not uncommon to repeat years, and so end up with more than 3-4 years in total. It’s also a common situation that one class won’t overlap exactly with a class taken somewhere else, so you end up skipping or repeating things.

In total, I’ve had more than 15 ‘years’ of language study, starting at the age of 16, including Dutch, Spanish, French and now German. I’ve also passed the Dutch state exam in the language, similar to the English language TOEFL. This allows me to work in some jobs requiring fluency, and would let me enroll in Dutch language higher education. I don’t consider myself any sort of expert in languages, but I do have a lot of experience in languages and language classes. I do have a pretty good understanding of the basic structure of languages.

Censored

As of 10 July my Trustpilot review for UVA Talen has been obscured, because UVA Talen flagged it as inappropriate. It seems they only find positive reviews appropriate. Trustpilot will now take about 3 weeks to decide if the review violates their terms and conditions, and if not what changes need to be made. I’m very confident of my review being returned intact, but in any case the original review will remain on this page as you see above.

Update 16 July: UvA Talen objected to my use of the word ‘racism’ and my mentioning this blog by name in the first review. Above is the updated review. For the moment UvA Talen has not objected to this version, and it’s visible on the Trustpilot site.

The Problems with Language Study in Amsterdam

The problem with studying languages in Amsterdam is it’s almost impossible to find a class to match my background.

For example I accidentally enrolled in one Dutch class that had students who couldn’t read or write in any language. Other classes were necessarily a mixture non-western refugees, with differing levels of education and familiarity with western customs.

A Chinese friend of mine who was a US citizen with a degree from Harvard University, was tracked by the Dutch immigration authorities into a language program for third world refugees, because she was born in China. Many things frustrated her about that class, but in particular she was given a computer program to help her learn Dutch. In teaching her to pronounce neus which is the Dutch word for nose, an animation kept pointing to a person’s nose and repeating the dutch word over and over. She said she knew where her nose was.

Many people have similar complaints about Dutch classes, and since language and education play important roles in class division here, the situation isn’t likely to change.

The situation isn’t that bad when it comes to studying other languages in Amsterdam, but some problems are similar. For example some text books are written for teenagers, or people with a limited education. Sometimes the textbooks used are very out of date, or just weren’t written well to begin with. The French classes I took were at a local secondary school (high school), taught in the evening. We sat in desks that were just a little bit too small, in a classroom decorated with teenage level motivational French posters.

Language is language, so these aren’t usually very serious problems, but it’s nice to have a class that fits you as a person. In fact many of the teachers I’ve had have been really good, and that goes a long way to making up for other problems.

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) Connection

The University of Amsterdam, abbreviated in Dutch as UvA, was always on my radar. When I was learning Dutch, I tried to enroll in classes there, but there was always some reason it wasn’t possible. I think mostly it was because they were located in the center of the city, classroom space was tight, and they wanted to keep space available for their students. It may technically have been possible to enroll in classes, but it was very discouraged.

A few years ago however, the UvA moved to a new and much larger campus. At the same time the government started talking about the opening up of education in the country, and the promotion of the idea of life-long learning. Student grants were replaced with student loans, and supposedly because students were now consumers, schools were supposed to be more motivated to provide education they wanted. The same thing happened with refugees coming to The Netherlands, who were given loans to pay for learning Dutch, and could choose any school they wanted, including the University of Amsterdam.

UvA Talen BV: What’s in a name?

The full name of UvA Talen is: UvA Talen BV. UvA is an abbreviation of the University of Amsterdam. ‘Talen’ is the dutch word for languages. BV means it’s a for profit business, with shareholders, limited liability and a board of directors. They call themselves the independent language institute of the University of Amsterdam.

In addition, as far as I’m aware, they have no accreditation. Students at the university don’t get course credit for taking language classes. In fact I am under the impression that no university in Europe gives credit for basic languages classes. I think most universities offer degrees in language study, but these degrees begin with the assumption that you are fluent in the language. Most universities offer language classes as a convenience to their students, but I’m pretty sure these are given outside of the normal academic programs. I’m not an expert in this kind of thing, so I hope someone will tell me if I’m wrong.

This is a very important issue. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the ‘University of Phoenix’ in the US, which is a for profit and non-accredited institution issuing degrees. Basically you go there as a student, it feels like a university, but when you graduate you get a diploma that isn’t recognized anywhere. In the meantime, they charge you for every possible service they can provide, and don’t really care what you learn.

Basically an institution without accreditation can hire anyone they want, don’t have to meet any recognized standards and can issue certificates or degrees to anyone they want. They are for profit and only concerned about making as much money as possible for their shareholders.

German Class at UvA Talen BV

First of all this is probably the most expensive option in Amsterdam for German classes.

German classes are offered for levels 1-6, so 2 levels correspond to what I referred to above as a ‘year’. In particular the first ‘year’, level 1 and 2 combined, represent the European standard level A1, which is important for continuing classes to some place else. Most classes and textbooks are organized according to this level system.

In particular, if I only completed German class 1, I would only have half a European standard level A1, which would make it difficult to transfer to another institution. A transfer like this would have meant starting a different text book in the middle. It would have been difficult to find another German class in Amsterdam that was underway and at the same place, not to mention near my house. It would have meant a lot of wasted time. I may of ended up doing a lot of self-study, then joining a class at A1.

Racist Teacher

The first thing that stood out in German class was the teacher was racist. This was racial profiling, racial slurs and granting privileges according to racial background. From the very first day the group of 3 Americans represented a big problem to him. We weren’t allowed to sit next to each other or do exercises together, because you know Americans ‘talk’.

He didn’t make any effort to talk to us or get to know who we were or what our interests or backgrounds were, just racially profiled us and followed racist stereotypes. The Americans were the stupid ones who couldn’t learn any languages, even if we tried.

At one point we were talking about similarities in grammar between German and Spanish. There were no native Spanish speakers in class, so he turned to the Portuguese student and started asking him about Spanish, as the sole expert on the language present. He didn’t know the answer, because the grammar construct isn’t in Portuguese, and he didn’t know what it was in Spanish. Otherwise, the teacher didn’t allow any discussion with the Americans, not being willing to accept that all 3 of us spoke Spanish.

This was a major disruption in class. It upset everyone a bit. It made the teacher seem really stupid. I don’t even think anyone put it on their evaluation forms at the end of class, because it’s not really the kind of thing you say, that the teacher is racist and stupid. It was much more his problem than ours.

I think this kind of thing also reflects very poorly on the language school, because it shows there are no standards or training to prevent this sort of problem. Really, all that has to happen is for someone to tell the teacher what racism is, and that it’s not acceptable in class, and that would likely solve the problem.

Of course if the problem persists, he shouldn’t be allowed to continue teaching, but this kind of thing can be dealt with in ways besides firing someone.

Very Bad Textbook

Our textbook was straight out of 1990. One of our first vocabulary words was fax machine. An entire lesson was spent on the parts of a computer, and discussing connecting the cables to the monitor and keyboard. A great deal of lesson time was spent using the telephone to answer newspaper ads, or buying train tickets from the ticket counter at the train station, which is mostly done online these days.

The textbook was full of typos and outright language mistakes.

The textbook also hardly had any grammar, and was mostly only exercises. We had a separate grammar book, but it was too small and concise to be useful, and written in German. Even now, as a more advanced Dutch speaker, I prefer to look up Dutch grammar in a book that explains it in English. This might not be the same with everyone in our class, but the option of an English language grammar book would have been useful to a lot of people.

I thought the exercises were poorly written, and for example had a list of nouns with the instructions to look them all up in a dictionary to determine their gender — or more easily, look in the answer book and determine their gender. I don’t think looking up nouns in a dictionary is a very useful learning experience. It’s more busy work than anything else.

Even in the later part of the book, which should have been addressing a lot of somewhat advanced grammar, there were exercises relating to vocabulary like ‘a ___ is a place to walk’, where the correct answer was sidewalk. I don’t really think this is an advanced grammar exercise.

Teaching Methods from 1990

The reason for learning a language is to be able to communicate with 1 or more other people, using that language. This purpose seemed to be completely lost in our class.

Most of our time was spent listening to lectures, often on somewhat complicated topics. Since we did not have any sort of comprehensive grammar book, we had to write down everything in a way that would make sense later. I tried a few times to take pictures of what the teacher was writing, but he was not very organized in what he wrote, so that didn’t work well. In effect, it was necessary to organize and write our own grammar reference from class lectures. There was no syllabus, outline, lesson plan or any other organizational document to help with this.

Of course some class lectures are necessary, but a lot of our time could have been better spent, for example working on communication in German. Many of the lectures could have better come from YouTube or a better grammar textbook.

There was no multimedia used, except the recorded dialogues from the textbook. No films, video lectures, examples of newscasts or dialects. No ‘real life’ information. The little online material we had was mostly from our textbook publisher, so also from 1990, or was taken from other German classes in the US.

Our homework assignments were sent by email, often only a couple of days in advance of the next class. They were from a jumble of different places in the exercise book, often a lot of work, and not usually following any sort of logic. They often seemed pointless.

In general it seemed like the goal of the class was not for us to learn German, but rather to keep us busy and make sure no one could complain.

Even our teacher complained about the textbook, and said using it wasn’t up to him. At a university I think you expect personal development on the part of the teachers, and for example using a textbook they’ve written or at least chosen. You want to be taught by someone who’s a recognized expert in their field, and attracted to the institution because of it’s reputation.

20% for the Exam

The course consisted of 10 weekly 2.5 hour lessons. The exam was given on the 9th lesson. Since the exam took an hour, if for example you weren’t interested in taking the exam, you might decide not to come at all on the 9th lesson.

Since the last lesson was spent going over the exam, then whatever else the instructor felt like talking about, especially if you don’t take the exam there may not be a lot of reason to come to this class either.

That means if you don’t care about the exam, you effectively loose 20% of your class time. Since you don’t receive any academic credit for the class anyway, and the people taking the class are trying to learn German, why not arrange the test independent of the class so the students can make use of all the class time they paid for?

This also means if you’re expecting to learn German to the A1 level, over 20 x 2.5 hour lessons, you’re effectively being lied to. Instead you’re learning this material over 16 lessons, with 4 lessons being dedicated to tests, which makes it much more intensive than advertised.

The Exam

A few weeks before the end of the first part of the class we started discussing the final exam, and we received an email reminding us we wouldn’t get our certificates or be allowed to enroll in the next class, unless we passed the exam. If we didn’t pass the first exam, there would be a second chance, but after that the ‘only’ option would be to retake the same class again.

I guess I had read this on their website, but didn’t take it very seriously. I have enough language experience, I didn’t expect to fail a beginning German class. In any case every language class I have ever taken had open enrollment, so I wasn’t expecting to be denied from enrolling in the second class if I really wanted to take it.

I took the first test, failed it then took the second test and failed it too. It’s certainly not totally impossible I failed, but it really surprised me. What was particularly galling was the only people in class who failed were two of the Americans on the receiving end of the teacher’s racism, and out of a possible 110 points I had only scored 5 points below a classmate who had passed. It really seemed like the teacher’s racial bias had impacted my test score, and I still believe it did. All of a sudden the teacher’s racism meant more than just making himself look stupid.

Appealing the Test

Time was running very short for enrollment in the next class, and there had been a delay in getting my test results, so there was a lot of time pressure. I sent some polite requests to review my test and discuss the situation, but there wasn’t going to be time. I finally added that the teacher is racist and I was planning to tell my story on the Internet.

My message was basically that I was a consumer, I had paid my money, I was unsatisfied, and I was offering them a chance to correct the situation before taking it to the Internet. I made clear to them that I was not going to tell any lies, only my true experiences and opinions, and I would try to be as fair as possible under the circumstances.

Well, threatening to write a review on the Internet got me an appointment, and eventually permission to enroll in the next German class. They made it clear this was only going to be an exception for me, so no one reading this should think they will make the same exception for them.

Concerning racism they said:

• They accused me of being insincere, and only trying to blackmail them.
• The teacher wasn’t racist, they didn’t have any racist teachers nor would they allow racism.
• Several times they tried to get me to promise not to say anything on the Internet, or to anyone else for that matter, but also said they didn’t think I could say anything that would matter.
• They said it was my fault because I didn’t come to them sooner, even though I had contacted them within 24 hours of being notified of my retest score.
• They said they couldn’t take it seriously because no one in the class said anything on their evaluations. This is even though I didn’t know my retest score when I filled out the evaluation.
• They said they had 700 students, and no one had ever said this to them before — if you decide to take a similar complaint to them, make sure you mention this blog post. Note, I’ve since found proof they lied to me in this review from Flavia who seems to have had my same teacher, and a similar complaint.

I think this is the response of a fundamentally racist institution. This is also a bit out of the 2000s, where saying these kinds of things to a Moroccan or Turk — or a woman, would have also not be taken seriously.

Another thing they said was if they had a racist teacher they would fire him. I leave this as an exercise for my readers. Have you taken a German class at UVA Talen since I’ve published post, and did you have a racist teacher? If yes, this is just one more lie to come from the administration.

I don’t think they’re prepared to take any complaints from any of their students seriously.

I think it was a mistake for them not to want to deal quietly with the racism, which would have been my preference too. Had there been any sort of workable outcome, I wouldn’t have said anything about racism here.

What I learned About the Test

In the course of discussing the test and racism with UvA Talen, I learned a number of interesting things.

First the test I took was written by my teacher, graded by my teacher, with an answer key and point system established by my teacher. There was nothing standardized about the exam. Many questions had several correct answers, graded at his discretion. The test was all written out answers, and he had a lot of discretion for minor spelling and gender errors. There is no doubt that the teacher could pass or not pass almost anyone he wanted, based on any criteria he choose to apply.

Compare this with the Dutch NT2 state exam I took. Most of the questions were multiple choice, computer scored, with a single correct answer. For the written out parts of the test we were allowed to use a dictionary to help correct typos or look up a few words. Even for the spoken and written out parts, there were clear standards and methods for scoring them. In addition, the test was given to a large group and graded on a curve to correct for the possibility that one version of the test was harder than another.

There was quite simply no method or science applied to developing or scoring the German exam in our class. There was no way for me to demonstrate bias, and no way for UvA Talen to prove no bias.

The purpose of their system of exams is simply to get students to blame themselves for failing, then retake and repay for unnecessary classes. It’s only driven by profit.

Conclusions

There were six of us that started in the level 1 class and went through to the second class. Of the six, two of us appear to have picked up some German. None of us conversed in a meaningful way in class, and mostly it seemed to have been a waste of time for all of us.

This isn’t a serious language institute, it’s a for profit business trying to get money out of it’s students. You won’t get credit anywhere for taking classes here. You won’t get a certificate that means anything. You won’t pass a test that’s meaningfully written. If you end up with a racist teacher, or have other problems, no one is going to care. It depends a lot on who you are and what motivates you to learn languages, but many people won’t learn languages in this way.

If you take a level 1 class, and don’t pass the exam, you’ll be in a bad situation. You are likely to find the test illogical, and probably difficult to pass. You won’t be allowed to go on to the next level, and will either have to repeat the class or transfer elsewhere. If you transfer elsewhere it will be at a non-standard place in the class (ie not an EU A1 level), so you’ll end up in a different text and in a different place in the class. Other language institutes in Amsterdam will allow you to take whatever level you want, and it’s better to just start with them in the first place, in order to complete an A1.

Amsterdam is full of cheaper and better language institutes. Some do have problems, and might not be well suited for educated people, but they are bound to be a better learning experience than UvA Talen.