The Goethe Institut: Learning through an online course

So last year I signed up to an online course with the Goethe Institut, which is basically the place to go to learn German in Sydney. They offer courses right up to C2, aka the level for fluency.

For A1 and A2, they also offer online courses. To get into the course I had to send in an application, which included some short answers I had to answer in German to the best of my ability as well as some multiple choice. I was shocking at the multiple choice since it required me to know a lot of grammar conventions, but I didn't want to cheat by googling so I ended up blind guessing a lot of it. You can see my short answer form with my responses here.

The online course was 8 weeks long, and I did it for two reasons: the classes were at inconvenient times and held at the inconvenient location of Bondi Junction, and it was significantly cheaper to complete A2 in one go, instead of in three terms of more expensive classes face-to-face. I realised very quickly that it was cheaper because it was less useful, as the online meeting times were always changing and I never made any of them because I had uni, so I was limited to the resources that were given to me and the short answer exercises we had to submit.

I really enjoyed the online modules and I did certainly learn more about grammar, but it felt very removed from conversation and I found myself struggling with just knowing enough nouns to make sense of the sentences. I think to continue this challenge I will need to do so with face-to-face lessons. Since I am now part-time at uni this will be more possible to achieve.