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The beginners class is frequently not for beginners

A room of people who already practise, at pace.

Classes labelled for beginners commonly contain a majority of people with existing practice, move at a speed that assumes familiarity with the positions and the vocabulary, and offer instruction that is largely a name and a demonstration. A genuine beginner in that room spends the hour behind and looking around.

That experience produces the most common outcome in this field, which is somebody attending twice and concluding it is not for them. They were right about the class and wrong about the practice.

What a beginner actually needs is a small number of positions taught slowly, with an explanation of what each is meant to be doing, and time to find them. Courses running over several weeks with the same group do this and are far less common than drop-in classes because they are harder to fill.

The practical advice is to look for a fundamentals course rather than a beginners class, to arrive early and tell the teacher it is your first time, and to leave a class that is moving too quickly rather than following along, which is where beginners get hurt.

There is one further reason the beginners class fails newcomers, which is vocabulary. An instruction given in a language the student does not know, followed by a demonstration they cannot see from the back, leaves them copying whoever is nearest, who may be doing it wrong. Teachers who name a position and then describe it in ordinary words solve most of this.