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Cactus Language Training - Press

Sunday Telegraph, Sept 6th 2006

Czech, please! Hazel Davis prepares for a weekend in Prague with a day's language tuition.

Jana Carlisle welcomes me into her Shepherds Bush home, smiling indulgently at my faltering dobry den (good day) and waiting while I wonder out loud whether I should ask to use the lavatory in Czech or English. Sheer linguistic inability on my part prevails and I am shown upstairs, in cut-glass English.

My lesson - a two-hour intensive session - has been designed to prepare me for a weekend in Prague. My host, a Czech native who is now settled in the UK, explains that first I must learn the sounds. I smile to myself, I did this on the train, mouthing "tch" and "dzj" at small children, attracting the concern of my fellow passengers.

As no-frills flights have proliferated, so the market in foreign-language training market has grown, with most LEA courses oversubscribed and almost 100,000 adult language students attending them in 2004, according to the National Centre for Language Learning.

Germaine Broadbent, Head of Cactus Language Training, says she has recently seen noticeably greater interest in Eastern European and Scandinavian languages. "This seems to be mainly for romantic reasons." she says.

"The travellers who tend to come to us are those with an open mind who want to get more from their travel experience. You will get a better reaction from the people you meet in restaurants, bars and on the street if you try to speak a few words of the language. And you can guarantee yourself a good anecdote if you try to start a conversation in a Prague bar in Czech."

Czech sounds are relatively easy to master. There are no sudden surprises, no silent letters and no irregular pronunciations. It's like Welsh but with less phlegm. Jana and I talk through the basic sounds and the fundamentals of the grammar and I practise words in context, with Jana offering a relevant example for each. It's not long before I am able to string a very basic sentence together and understand much more.

Czech is a Slavic language, dating back to the 11th century. It's a "synthetic" language, which means that unlike English and other "analytical" languages, grammatical aspects are expressed by changing the structure of a word, adding a suffix or modifying the root, rather than by adding whole words. Once this rather hefty barrier is overcome, I learn quickly and my teacher declares me "a good pupil".

My tailor-made lesson from Brighton-based Cactus Language Training culminates in a meal at a Czech club in West Hampstead with another of the company's part-time employees, Vit, a charming and brainy PhD student from the Czech Republic, who sits patiently while I stumble through some rudimentary stuff about preferring my water with gas.

Unfortunately for me the waiter isn't in on the charade and sweetly answers my hesitant Czech with "Is it this one you want?" and "Are you sure, it's a sausage you know?" Vit and I quickly abandon the exercise to discuss (in my native tongue) modern Czech literature and the effect of Communism on the nation's psyche. A healthy discussion about the role of flags in a nationalistic society ensues and the language lesson is more or less redundant.

Or is it? Cactus language courses tailor the sessions to suit the user and as such my two-hour session with Jana somehow managed to prepare me simultaneously for ordering food, discussing cultural history and understanding verb declension. Topped off with a hearty glug of apricot brandy, the lesson covered an impressive amount.
I wouldn't claim that my intensive session has left me able to discuss the finer points of Vaclav Havel's essays in their native language, but I definitely feel confident enough to wander into that Prague bar and discuss whether my water is fizzy enough. And that's progress.

Cactus Language Training (0845130 4775; www.cactuslanguagetraining.com) offers intensive tailor-made courses in Czech and other languages from £30 an hour; 10-lesson courses cost from £129. One-to-one telephone courses are also available. Further information from the Cactus website.