Hello all,

i'm currently in Switzerland on a visit visa, (i'm a third-country citizen)
i wish to take up a french language course so the question is:

1-can i enroll and change obtain a student visa while in the country (even if it requires exiting and coming back)

2-can a student visa be issued for a language course (french) ?

i would highly appreciate a solid answer

thanks in advance

Zed.

I don't think you can change it as such. You'd need to apply for the course and be accepted. Meanwhile you'd probably have to leave Switzerland and apply for the Type D visa from your home country.

Medea is right, you have to request this visa at the Swiss consulate in your country.

It actually depends on your citizenship. Some non-eu nationals can get a student permit when in switzerland. You can generally find out by going to the swiss embassy website in your home country (eg swiss embassy in Washington). That should then explain what you need to do to get a student permit and whether a visa is necessary.

You can get a student visa to learn french.

Agree with Medea, plus want to add that even if you were to be able to apply for a visa while here, you will definitely have to send in your passport to the consulate and will then need to pick up the visa in your home country - but you'd be unable to leave to go pick it up as you'd have no passport.

Other than that, here's some info on what you need to do; rules differ for courses of less than three months and courses of longer than 3 months http://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/...aty/rustv.html It's from the Russia page (for some reason), but non-EU is non-EU, so it's safe to assume that the same rules apply.

Before you make a blanket statement, would it make a difference if I told you I had done this already and it is possible?? There are numerous non eu countries that have exceptions. The OP needs to check requirements for his citizenship and not rely on advice on here.

OP's profile indicates Syrian nationality. I don't think that's an "exception" country for visa purposes.

Numerous = a few. So the exceptions appear to be Japan, Malaysia, San Marino, Vatican City, New Zealand. Explains why passport control get confused when they can't find my visa.

US, Canada, OZ and the like maybe. He seems to be Syrian. That will hardly be one of the exceptions.

And it doesn't change the fact that he has to pick up the visa outside the country, which he can't do as he won't be in possession of a passport. So no way - leave, apply, re-enter.

I guess it's case by case. I know of an Iranian girl who came to Switzerland (Zürich) on a Schengen tourist visa some 3 years ago and decided to stay in order to learn French (she was not interested by German, in parts maybe because for her, Swiss-German was a very ugly-sounding language) so she went to the office cantonal de la population of canton Vaud and was successful in changing her status without the need to go back to Iran. She now has a B-permit...

Well there's always exceptions to the rule. Expectations should not be based on a couple of cases out of hundreds.

But the rule is not to come here as a tourist, apply for a language course visa and basically stay forever. The rule is to have to leave once the tourist visa runs out, apply for a student visa from home, come back for a limited period of time to study and then leave again.