-:- Message from TripAdvisor staff -:-

TripAdvisor staff removed this post because it did not meet TripAdvisor's forum posting guidelines with prohibiting self-promotional advertising or solicitation.

We ask all of our members to keep their forum messages free of self-promoting advertisements or solicitation of any kind - members affiliated with any tourism-related business should not include commercial contact information or URLs in their forum messages.

To review the TripAdvisor Forums Posting Guidelines, please follow this link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/forums_posting_guidelines.html

We remove posts that do not follow our posting guidelines, and we reserve the right to remove any post for any reason.

I'd recommend Sprachart Berlin, www.sprachartberlin.de. It's not so well known as other well advertised schools, but the courses are of really high quality. A lot of speaking, a warm atmosphere, really gets you prepared for real-life situations and using German right as you leave the school building :) The course prices are really low in comparison to other schools. The school is located in Kreuzberg, in the middle of everything, and just a few minutes from U-Bahn.

-:- Message from TripAdvisor staff -:-

TripAdvisor staff removed this post because it did not meet TripAdvisor's forum posting guidelines with prohibiting self-promotional advertising or solicitation.

We ask all of our members to keep their forum messages free of self-promoting advertisements or solicitation of any kind - members affiliated with any tourism-related business should not include commercial contact information or URLs in their forum messages.

To review the TripAdvisor Forums Posting Guidelines, please follow this link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/forums_posting_guidelines.html

We remove posts that do not follow our posting guidelines, and we reserve the right to remove any post for any reason.

I would never trust glowing reviews from first-time posters..

Avoid DeutschAkademie, Very bad customer support after you pay your money.

One of the bad things for a business in Germany is to delegate a task to a bad company. DeutschAkademie has delegated its money collection to one of the worst companies (Ingenico Group - Ingenico ePayments ) in Germany and I believe it will ruin DeutschAkademie ongoing business.. This was even starting with hiring irresponsible staff of DeutschAkademie - DeutschAkademie and Ingenico, very bad customer care of both..

Take care because taking a course there may result in you paying a fine or going to jail..

I still maintain the Geothe Institut is one of the best language school in Germany. I attended there in the 80's, my sister attended there in the 90's and recently a younger relative attended a course at the Berlin location and had an excellent experience there. They offer many different types of courses, geared to your specific needs, whether it be conversational, or business, short courses or longer ones. I learned most of my German from the Geothe Institut.

Goethe Institut is the best. I have studiwd there. The only drawback is that in Germany is is pricey. If you can afford it , it is just superb.

i have the Goethe Institude right in my neighborhood and I meet some of the students at my local beer bar and they all talk highly of the programm and having a good time in Frankfurt.

Too many schools offer "nur Deutsch" (only German) courses, from start to finish. With this comes a continual state of confusion (yours & other students), miming out concepts, everything by example (even if you don't understand the examples either), and countless hours of frustration. "Nur Deutsch" aka "Deutsch als Fremdsprach" operates on the "military training regime"... destroy the student's ego & fundamental understanding of a [any] language, specifically your mother-language, and rebuild your entire understanding of languages from scratch. Expect to learn how to do everything, from taking a bus to learning what the Internet actually is, as though you just arrived from Mars where no languages actually existed or you have never seen a television before. Expect to be "re-trained" on how to be polite through 10+ ways to be polite in German. Expect to be told to memorize tables, yet not how the contents of the tables are to be used. Expect to be ridiculed & belittled for asking questions of how, why or what, when after countless "zum Biespeil" (by example) you still don't understand what you are learning or how it applies to your fundamental understanding of languages & language usage. Expect to enter an environment where German is some special language that exists in some alternative universe and follows its own set of rules & laws. And lastly, pray your teacher cares more about teaching you a language and the quality of their teaching, than just following the "nur Deutsch" monolingualism ideology that is unfortunately rampant inside Germany. If your first language is English, just be aware, English is not welcome here, your use of it will brand you as "lazy" by default.

Wow Hans, congratulations for the "make the least sense today"post on TA. Not easy to get that badge of honor, but what you wrote made no sense or is based on any reality.