Making the application

I assume that you are a college student or a young professional and that you are highly motivated to learn to speak English fluently.

You will do much better if you seek ways in which you can speak English correctly from the very beginning. Strike a careful balance between free speech and forcing yourself to follow a pattern of correct English use. Do everything in your power to use English correctly.

In the early weeks of English study, this may require that you spend more time repeating recorded Spoken English Learned Quickly exercises than in trying to engage in free speech. Later, however, you will need to spend a great deal of time talking with others.

Nonetheless, every time you encounter new syntax in English, use controlled language drills long enough so that your mind becomes thoroughly familiar with correct sentence structure and pronunciation. If you are using the Spoken English Learned Quickly lessons, repeat the exercises until you can say them quickly and accurately with perfect pronunciation.

As you progress in your English study, begin reading English newspaper articles aloud. Look for examples of new vocabulary and sentence format. Mark the sentences, verify the vocabulary, and then read—and repeat from recall memory—the sentences aloud until they become a part of your speech.

Controlled language study

The better alternative is to derive all initial spoken language study from audio recorded materials which contain perfect syntax, perfect use of the verb, and perfect pronunciation. This sounds restrictive, but, in fact, it can be done with the Spoken English Learned Quickly lessons.

Say, for example, that during the first two weeks of English study, you used only the Spoken English Learned Quickly recorded exercises. You would repeat the recorded lesson material which was accurate in every detail. For the entire instruction period, you would work by yourself while repeating the exercise sentences hundreds of times.

Needless to say, in two weeks' time, you would have spoken English correctly far more than had you been passively sitting in a traditional English class. But more to the point, everything you would have learned would have been correct. Your syntax would have been correct.

Your use of the English verb would have been correct. And, as much as possible, your pronunciation would have been correct.

To continue the example, say that it was now time for you to begin trying free speech. Yet, we still would not want you to make mistakes. Consequently, all free speaking would be taken directly from the many sentences you would have already learned.

Your teacher would ask questions from the Spoken English Learned Quickly exercises so that you could answer in the exact words of the sentences you would have studied. Subsequently, you would be given questions to answer which would use the same structure as the sentences you already knew, but now you would substitute other vocabulary words which would be in the same lessons

four simple rules you must follow when you are learning to speak English

There are four simple rules you must follow when you are learning to speak English:

1. To learn to speak English correctly, you must speak it aloud:

It is important that you speak loudly and clearly when you are studying spoken English. You are retraining your mind to respond to a new pattern of proprioceptive and auditory stimuli. This can only be done when you are speaking aloud at full volume.

One of the reasons that your English study in school required so much time while producing such poor results is that none of the silent study did anything to train your tongue to speak English.

2. To learn to speak English fluently, you must think in English:

The proprioceptive sense is not all that you are retraining when you learn spoken English. There is cognitive learning (memory) which must also take place. Grammar-based English instruction has emphasized cognitive learning to the exclusion of retraining the proprioceptive sense. Nonetheless, cognitive learning is an important part of learning to speak English fluently.

For speech to occur, your mind must be actively involved in syntax development. The more actively your mind is involved in spoken English, the more effective the learning process becomes.

However, just as you will hinder proprioceptive training by trying to study silently, so you will also limit cognitive learning by reading from a text rather than constructing the syntax in your own mind. If you are studying English with Spoken English Learned Quickly, you may use the written text when you first study a new exercise. However, after repeating the exercise two or three times, you must close the text and do the exercise from recall memory as you listen to the audio recording. You must force your mind to think in English by using your recall memory when you are studying spoken exercises. You cannot read from a text.

I will come back to this later in Chapter 5: Selecting a Text, because there will be times when reading from a text such as a newspaper is an effective language learning tool. But when you are doing sentence responses with recorded exercises, you must force your mind to develop the syntax by doing the exercise without reading from a text

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You are not thinking in English if you are reading. Making your mind work in order to think of the answer is an important part of learning to speak English.

3. The more you speak English aloud, the more quickly you will learn to speak it fluently:

Proprioceptive retraining is not instantaneous. It will require a great deal of repetition to build the new language patterns in your mind. As these new patterns develop, there will be progression from a laborious, conscious effort, to speech which is reproduced rapidly and unconsciously.

When you speak your first language, you do so with no conscious awareness of tongue or mouth position and the air flow through the vocal cords. In contrast, it requires experimentation and conscious effort when you first attempt to make an unknown discrete sound in English—this single sound, usually represented by one letter, is called a phoneme. Some new sounds will be relatively simple for you to make. Others will be more difficult.

To add to the complexity, each phoneme has other phonemes or stops adjacent to it which change its sound slightly. (A stop is a break caused by momentarily restricting the air flow with the tongue or throat.) For example, the simple English sentence, "Why didn't that work?" may be difficult for you to pronounce if your language does not use the English "th" sound. But it may give you difficulty for another reason as well. There are actually two stops in the sentence. When properly pronounced, there is a stop between the "n" and "t" in "didn't" and another stop between the final "t" in "didn't" and the first "t" in "that." Even though the sentence may be said very quickly, the two stops would make it, "Why didn / t / that work?"

Your objective is not to be able to write the sentence, "Why didn't that work?" accurately in English. Your goal is not even to be able to say it just well enough so that someone could figure out what you meant. Your objective is to be able to say, "Why didn't that work?" so perfectly to an American that she would think she had just been asked the question by a fellow American.

That degree of perfection will require thousands—if not tens of thousands—of repetitions. Therefore—to be somewhat facetious—the more quickly you correctly repeat a particularly difficult phoneme ten thousand times, the more quickly you will be able to use it fluently. That is what I mean when I say, "The more you speak English aloud, the more quickly you will learn to speak fluently."

4. You must never make a mistake when you are practicing spoken English:

When you are learning spoken English using the Spoken English Learned Quickly method, you are strongly reinforcing the learning process each time you speak. However, when you construct a sentence incorrectly, you have not only wasted the learning time used to construct that sentence, but you must now invest even more time in order to retrain your mind, mouth, and hearing in order to construct the sentence correctly. The more you use a sentence structure incorrectly, the longer it will take for your mind, mouth, and hearing to identify the correct syntax.

Ideally, if you used only correct syntax and pronunciation, you could retrain your speech in considerably less time. Consequently, you would learn to speak fluent English more quickly.

Yet, before you conclude that this would be impossible, let's look at a way in which it can actually be done using the Spoken English Learned Quickly language course. (Well, it can almost be done!)

Traditional English study:

Traditional methods of teaching English attempt to engage the students in free speech as quickly as possible. Though the goal is commendable, in practice it has a serious drawback.

A beginning student does not have enough language background to be able to construct sentences properly. More to the point, the instruction program seldom has enough teachers to correct every student's errors. Consequently, beginning students regularly use incomplete sentences having incorrect syntax and verb construction.

The instructor often praises them for their valiant effort, in spite of the reality that they are learning to use English incorrectly. The student will now need to spend even more time relearning the correct syntax.