Reviews of Middlebury Language Schools (College)

new user

The Arabic Language School is not very good. The program actually hinders the study of Arabic. They do nothing to take into account that their students come with different goals. Some people need to learn Modern Standard Arabic for their jobs. Others want to learn conversational proficiency in a dialect. Dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are not mutually comprehensible, yet the school lumps everybody together, separated by ability level which they ascertain by a placement test which is MSA. So, if your reading and writing skills in MSA are good, you will find yourself in a high-level class but you will not be able to understand your teachers when they talk to you. It's so dumb. They INUNDATE you with homework, which is mostly mindless multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank exercises. I would not recommend this program to anybody except very advanced students, who already have a high level of proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, and listening with both MSA and a dialect. There are cheaper, better ways to develop basic proficiency.

David Fox

Our daughter did the program in Beijing. It was a great experience for a high school student, but the main weakness was there was no emphasis on teaching tones. As a consequence they had a lot of trouble making themselves understood in restaurants. My understanding is that the Vermont school is quite different, the Beijing program is not directly run by the school.