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About the trips:Discover the Languedoc like a VIP
Guided Tours and French tuition
Are you weary of attending French classes that teach you grammar but don’t offer you enough practice in speaking the language? Grammar is, of course, essential to mastering the French language. You may, however need a fresh approach to encourage the head knowledge to descend into the level of everyday usage, where speaking becomes instinct and idioms are just as important as sentence structure.
This is where Alain Curta comes in. Alain Curta was born in Paris and lived in Holland for many years. Now he lives between Sète and Pézenas, and he offers intensive small group or one to one tuition in French. With years of experience as a tourist guide in Holland and Paris, he now offers tailor-made visits of the area over a day or more. Take-up among local expatriates has been high, and if you are visiting the area on holiday why not combine your visit with a guided tour, which can also include French conversation and tuition, although tours can also be conducted in English. This is an ideal method of improving your French if you don’t want to spend your whole holiday at a language school, or would simply like to maintain your skills.
Discovering the Languedoc with Alain Curta becomes an exercise in everyday essential French – no spoken English allowed between visitors except for a few breaks for your tired English brains. Alain has his own very personal, friendly and relaxed manner of bringing into your visit a mine of information about local history, origins of French words, and a gentle correction of your language. It is so much easier to learn French when you can interrupt your conversation to ask someone those questions that you never think of when in a classroom. Your tour becomes not just a visit to a major tourist attraction but a discovery of wider horizons and an application of theory to life. I recently accompanied Alain and two British residents who expressed their enthusiasm for this method of learning French and would recommend it highly to anyone.
We visited the Pont du Gard on an autumn day which was bright and sunny and warm enough to enjoy a light lunch outdoors at the café following our exploration of the site. Nearby, the mediaeval village of Castillon-du-Gard provided a contrasting visit. Our enjoyment was made all the easier by the absence of crowds - the region is perfect for discovering in September and October.
Helen Jennings
About the course
I have just returned from a week’s residential course at Marseillan, which is quite close to Pezenas.
The company is called Domitia-France and we found them from an advert on the Languedoc page. We stayed in a gite in the heart of a vineyard and ate with the owners of the vineyard. The family are French and speak no English; we ate with them at Breakfast, Dinner and Tea time. We were joined every morning at breakfast by our tutor, we then returned to our gite which is in the grounds of the vineyard and had formal lessons for about 4 hours. We then had dinner with the family and held conversations in French.
In the afternoon we were taken out in the local area by our tutor to visit villages, museums, vineyards and tourist offices. We were then able to put our French into practice. The course followed the same format every day and built on the previous day’s lesson.
The tutor was excellent and had a very calming effect, he never put you under pressure more eased out of you the French that you had learnt. I found this to be an excellent way of teaching and find when under pressure that no words come out.
You are able to take the course without the accommodation and meals if you live locally but for us it was too far to travel each day. We also found the experience of the total immersion of living with a French family a big help.
I can highly recommend this company and above all it was there to teach you French but we had a really enjoyable week as well.
Wendy Mac Dermott
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