"I still have mixed impression of this trip. I took the ""Intensive English"" course, but it turned out that there was no intensive English courses in this school at all !!! Most of the students come for a few months, respectively, they have nowhere to hurry. As it seemed to me, I had received only 20% of the knowledge that could be obtained with proper level of teaching. All the topics were very stretched. The material, which took us 4 hours, could be completed in 1 hour.
In addition, extra lessons I had paid for turned out to be just hours of independent work. I just got access to the online resource and library. It is a great pity that I was not warned about this ...
I also did not like that I could not choose the time of lessons myself (morning/afternoon). I planned to study in the morning, and work in the evening. But in Kaplan Sydney it is decided without the participation of the student.
I had to meet three times with different managers to get a transfer to the group with the most intensive training and for a higher level. I was unpleasantly surprised that talking about transferring to another group I was told that all the classes were overcrowded. Why are you recruiting students then?
In the end, I didn't finish the last 2-3 days of study, because I didn't want to waste my time. Instead, I went on a short trip around Australia.
But not everything was so bad. There are also good points: all the school staff are incredibly responsive and friendly! The ladies at the reception responded to my requests almost instantly. School managers were also happy to discuss my problems, even though they were not always able to meet my requests.
Due to the search for an ""ideal"" group, I had six teachers. I can say that they are all different, with different methods, but all of them are true professionals.
I also made a lot of new friends: now I have friends from Asia, from South Africa, from Brazil. By the way, I want to note that 60-70% of the students are Asians.
I was lucky with my host family, they were nice and responsive. But I want to warn that the Internet in all the host families is not free - it is $ 20 per week, which is very expensive (a sim card costs only $ 30 per month). Apparently, families make additional money that way.
As for the LinguaTrip, I can only thank the guys, especially Alexei. At first I tried to contact directly with Kaplan, but I had to wait for each answer for a very long time. So I decided to trust LinguaTrip and did not regret it. Here I was able to solve all the problems much more quickly than directly with the school.
