i just got back from french class, and it was a slightly bewildering experience.

i speak a fairly decent german (very very little SG), and want to refresh french, which i picked up donkey years ago. so i signed up for a probelektion at migros. but everyone in the class was swiss, and they spoke schwiitzer düütsch with one another, including the teacher

after the class, i told the teacher my concerns, and she said the rest of the class could use high german, but i feel bad about it.

anyone with similar experience? what did u do?

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These go to Eleven.

Surely it should all be in French??

good point! as i mentioned, i am trying to refresh my french, but the level i wanna join at is quite low (forgot a lot of basics), a lot of explainin is done in the local language, which is SG in this case. u may be right though, after a certain level, it would be completely in french.

On the contrary I would say. Even more important at lower levels to be taught through "total immersion" or as close to it as possible. Seems to me you may want to try to shop around for another school.

That is unusual. Every German class I've been to here has been conducted all in German, with a few exceptions to explain a couple of things in English during one class since most people at least understood English better than German.

Did they speak Swiss at the beginning, the end of the lesson or most of the way through? As it's a basic beginner's class your teacher could be just getting to know everyone, setting up a relaxed atmosphere and completely overlooked the fact you don't speak Swissgerman. Funny though, as I teach Swiss classes English the only time I speak German is to translate high German grammer into English. Often in beginner's class confidence is low and I have to go over High german grammer again as they have forgotton. Maybe your teacher is doing something similar.. though if that is the case shouldn't he/she be speaking in High german just to explain difficult points. Next week you could try introducing yourself and asking if everyone to speak high german so you could feel apart of things. But if your teacher continues to speak any swiss or german and not French and, more importantly, if you don't feel comfortable you'll need to find a better class.

I think I am in exactly the same situation as you Hsiang, I speak decent German and learned French at school and would love to refresh it.

Where are you doing this course?

well, it was a french class in baden, and all the participants spoke german and SG. when the teacher has to explain something not in french, she did it in SG.

hey brett, the french probelektion was at the migros klubschule at the baden train station. u can take the online Einstufungstest, report your score to the school and request for a probelektion. the school will then recommend a class for u to try out. it can all happen quite fast too; if u do the test this weekend, u can call them on monday morning, and try out a class in the week. if your level is high enough, u could head into a class where they speak only french. i'm not quite there

well, to be precise, she spoke french 70% of the time, and only used SG to explain difficult bits. if i remember how my german classes went, the teacher started speaking completely in german after the 3rd course, which is where i'm headed next.

should i just wing it until it the next course, when it'll be a level playing field? migros is quite affordable...

If she starts speaking in HG to explain points next week won't that be better? You also have to take into consideration that you're a false beginner of sorts: not knowing what level you're at until you, the teacher and the class get going. Hang on in there, after a couple of weeks the class set up and teaching method will settle into a clear routine and you'll know where you are and what you want out of it.

Normally the official teaching language in Switzerland is High German, except for foreign language classes where it should be the language taught unless the level is too low. However, since the Swiss don't like speaking High German, they like to forget that. That's why it's always good to remind them.
If you talk to people outside of class you might also want to try speaking in English. Paradoxically, many Swiss Germans (including myself) prefer English to High German.

thanks! i dun feel so bad about asking for HG this week also, i'll see if anyone will speak with me in english

Good luck Hsiang and let us know how it goes

Good luck Hsiang, I hope it works out. My language learning for German was the total immersion method meaning at no time was English spoken even from the very beginning, when confusion reigned the teacher was quite adept at explaining in simple german with hand signals etc, I caught on reasonably quickly.

thanks, swisstree, louis! hope it works out this time. the last time i took french (20 years ago) i was too distracted by the french teacher and the pouty way she pronounced "rue." (french for street) et voila, i got a big fat FAIL after 2 years

I had this when I went to do a French course in zurich (with the uni!) I was expecting that the teacher would be speaking all the time in French - even to explain things to us as that is how it's always been in my language courses. But he never even tried to explain in French, always in SG! I tried to follow as much as I could but when I didn't understand, someone else in the class explained to me in English. Was quite annoying when he gave us vocab lists to learn though..had to translate from german to english before I could understand the French!