REAL SPOKEN ENGLISH MASTERY
Spoken English is not the same as textbook English. This is a fact that few students
understand. They simply don’t realize that the English they learn in schools is not the
English that native speakers use in normal conversations.
To be honest, I don’t know why schools neglect real spoken English. Why do they teach
only formal English? Why don’t they prepare their students for the real world? Ever
since I became a teacher, I have asked those questions. Eventually, I created my own
companies to help students learn real spoken English.
Learn Real English is one of those companies. At Learn Real English, we focus on the
true, casual, everyday spoken English used by native speaker North Americans. We
teach idioms and slang, because native speakers use these in every conversation.
In our lessons, you rarely find full, formal, complete sentences. Why not? Because in
real spoken conversations, native speakers almost never use complete sentences. We
speak in partial sentences. We interrupt each other. We change thoughts in the middle
of a sentence. We use filler words constantly.
Real spoken pronunciation is also quite different than what you learn from schools and
textbooks. In a normal conversation, native speakers tend to mash words together. In
school, you learned a few standard contractions… but in fact, we create a huge number of
non-standard contractions all the time. We connect some words together, and we cut
other words shorter.
When you combine all of these differences, you get conversations that sound totally
different than what you learned from school and books.
Unfortunately, this is a source of extreme frustration for many students. Any student
who has visited North America will tell you that the English spoken on the street is
nothing like the English they learned at home in school.
Our goal at Learn Real English is to prepare you for the real world of spoken English. To
do that, we record and use only real, spontaneous, unplanned conversations between
native speakers. We call people on the phone, chat with them, and record the
conversation. Usually, we do not tell the other person that they are being recorded (until
the conversation is finished). We want them to speak completely naturally.
Another feature of our lessons is that we don’t edit the conversations. We never cut out
filler words. Our goal is not to create some kind of “perfect” artificial conversation…
our goal is to capture the real, messy English language in daily use.
We then provide you with tools to understand these messy, real conversations. We give
you vocabulary lessons to explain the huge number of idioms and slang that you’ll hear.
We give you the famous Effortless English Mini-Stories, to guarantee that you learn
everything deeply and effortlessly. We give you text transcripts of everything, to help
you understand faster.
When you finish all 30 lessons (you’ll do one lesson set everyday for one week… thus
finishing the program in 30 weeks) – you’ll be able to talk with native speakers quickly
and effortlessly… and you’ll understand when they talk to each other.
If you like, as your final test you can come to San Francisco and meet the people you
hear on the lessons!