This is my response to this blog post:
Firstly I guess the guy has wrong expectations from language courses. To me a language class consisiting of 16 students only can provide students with learning the basics of the language, it won't/can't in anyway make me even slightly fluent in the language. For fluency the student must do many things on its own. The courses are just the start up, after you know greetings and some words and basic grammer you must spend time and design a plan to reach fluency based on yourown learning styles. If this message is not given to students clearly and they think they should be going to the courses everyday and for years to reach fluency, well someone must be blamed, maybe the teachers.
Secondly, to me language courses are what they are: boring. I can't tolerate even the best of language courses after some while. I prefer to learn something else, e.g. a skill using the target language or start making friends in the new language and do both at the same time. I learnt English this way. I bought many software programming books in English and started learning programming and the English learning just turned into a byproduct of learning computee sciences. This way I wasn't worried about how much time I was spending on it because both were evenly useful skills. Meanwhile many friends of mine got into English language courses and came out again and again as they lost the motivation.
I think our spanish friend should start collecting his own Finnish grammer books and references and even find a personal tutor to speed up things, and use the courses as an opportunity to put Finnish at work.
