(Online) Language Courses – Tips on Enhancing Your Qualifications from Home
Are you considering a career in healthcare or as a caregiver abroad but lack the necessary language skills? Or are you already working abroad and wish to improve your language proficiency? In that case, you have likely started considering the best way to quickly acquire a foreign language. Over the past year, due to the pandemic, we have learned to operate entirely differently than before. Almost everything has shifted to the online world, including language courses. Today, there are various online lessons where the quality of teaching is the same as in-person, while also saving you the time you would spend commuting to the course.
How to Choose a Language Course
Language courses vary in different criteria – from classification according to language levels (from official A1 to C2 to verbal labels like "beginner" or "advanced") to teaching methods and, not least, price. In some courses, it is possible to take a placement test at the beginning, which assigns you the level at which you should start, while others begin entirely from the basics. In Slovakia, there are many companies offering online language courses. During the pandemic, even language schools that previously did not offer this option adapted and created opportunities for remote learning.
These include globally recognized institutions such as the Goethe Institute and the Slovak Institute of Education. Other examples include the Humboldt Institute for Distance Learning or the Vista language school, operating both in our country and with our Czech neighbors.
The independent Czech portal arecenze compared the quality of various online German language courses this year, as there is a high demand for German language skills, usually due to the need to work abroad. These courses are most frequently sought by healthcare professionals and caregivers. Our people also have the advantage of choosing not only from Slovak but also Czech online courses. The individual courses were evaluated according to general criteria that language teaching should include, and separate reviews were assigned to each school.
You can find a detailed overview of the comparison and results here.
We hope today's tips have helped you gain a better understanding of the language study options available today. If you are a complete beginner, you can look forward to our upcoming blog series on the basics of German for caregivers. We would be delighted if you also share your experiences with remote language learning with us – the best tips will then be shared on our Facebook pages, so others can better navigate based on your experience.