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Here we provide excerpts from a seminar given to members of the New York Press Association, "The Learning Annex" and other audiences in the New York and California areas.

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4 Part 5  Part 6

Broken, Bad or Poor English hinders intellectual development and prevents you of learning effectively...

Part 1

The Host: Introducing Mr. Michael Shestov -- international investigative journalist, instructor-innovator, and author of the best-selling books "Learn How To Learn and Teach Ten Times More Effectively" and "Yes! You Can Master Any Language", which scrupulously analyze traditional, charlatan, intensive, "revolutionary", "innovative", and "accelerated" methods of studying native and foreign languages.

Michael Shestov: When the "aborigines" of America can hardly even dream of effectively improving any level of language skills of the "regular", "old", and "new" Americans, who is left to help the foreign authors of modern self-study manuals and English courses master pronunciation and teach themselves to speak and write standard American English fluently?

The Host: You are the author of the only learning system that seems to make sense. Do you remember a story about a Dane from an impoverished village who's gone to America to make money, without knowing English and without any interest in learning English? That's how he never opened the "door" leading to his American dream. Not everybody understands that, nowadays, to open the door into America one needs to master American English as fast as possible. It's not a secret that the effectivity of the methods of learning and mastering American English is pretty close to zero. But judging by the tremendous flow of students, you have "a golden key" to America.

I have two questions for you: How does one learn American English? And what influenced you -- an international lecturer on educational improvement matters -- to create, only a few years ago, your own speech and learning ability improvement audio and video self-study courses?

Shestov: I was "forced" to do so by my decade-long desire to help -- in a practical way -- my colleagues of many nationalities and people of different ages, genders, and levels of knowledge -- especially those who couldn't attend my "Learn How To Learn" public seminars, those who -- "result-free" -- attended existing English-learning schools and/or couldn't follow so-called simple recommendations of the books and courses. In other words, I wanted to help people by developing a very comprehensive "foundation creating" course. You know, in my books I some time ago described "How To Learn And Teach Properly". There was no expert to be found in the field who would even try to argue against my logic; most colleagues of all ranks kept silent. I took that as a clear sign of agreement with my simple rules of the "Natural Law of Learning for Children and Adults".

But for the last seven years something has changed. Unfortunately it's only the commercials and infomercials. Now there are "fresh", smart-sounding reports of great results and seeming multitudes of happy consumer references from individuals who have learned or improved a language in the course of 3 to 72 hours. It's odd that the wording from fellow instructors sounds an awful lot like that published in my books and newspaper articles.

The actual methods of instruction haven't changed, however. These "learning" techniques, seemingly as old as the world itself, show up all over the place. Take popular travel magazine ads asking customers to choose their own way of learning from:

• Repeating multiple times the words and grammar usages by reading books and memorizing various tables, all the while being begged to "try to memorize and retain" by images and look at lots of "cute" pictures of objects and events,

• Staring at the computer or TV screen so as to absorb thousands of appearing and then disappearing words and sentences, some translated, some not,

• Eating or driving, while listening and learning, and

• Listening, following the text with your eyes, while trying to imitate the professionally,fast-speaking narrator.

New people contact me on a daily basis complaining that "Hundreds of repetitions of those exercises do not help!" and that "their psychological state of mind" is flatly not being improved.

Do you remember watching youngsters (even yourself) at a school "Language Arts Laboratory", trying to repeat after a narrator or an instructor -- in English, French, Indonesian, whatever -- yet not capable of simulating the actual sounds of those foreign languages? Even young people (14 years of age or slightly older) cannot do those mass repetitions properly. Only a very small percentage of them do it well enough to get their brains to comprehend, memorize, retain, and recall an "abracadabra" composed from foreign sounds. Plus, most of them forget 99 percent of all "learned" within a year or two. We know that youngsters have very "grabby", "catchy" brains -- but they still don't work the way commercials promise.

Okay, try to imagine yourself, now, being forced to make repetitious incoherent rambling -- especially when almost all of the original sounds articulated are pronounced erroneously -- or inattentively listening at lengths to a speaker, or being requested to write/type essays you know must be full of errors, or you are forced to try to primitively converse in "your new language", not at all following any grammar, style, or normal (quality) sound reproduction?

How often have you heard, "if you repeat it often enough, you'll eventually get it"? But do you ever actually get it?

Horrible, isn't it? It's like somebody is trying to teach you how to drive a car while all you have at your disposal is a three-wheeled bicycle. The main question and moral: How can you imitate the way your instructor speaks (or sings, for that matter) if no one has previously helped you master pronunciation by giving you the tools to learn or improve that particular skill?

Realize that, as an adult, you are most likely totally incapable of "off hand" imitating -- not only someone speaking a foreign language -- but even the actors and actresses at your local theater, not to mention the professional television broadcasters of your own country, speaking in your native language! You cannot easily learn to simulate anybody of your choice -- even people in your own town -- simply because you have the desire!

Part 2

The stupidity of your being expected to naturally mimic someone else is exactly what you can expect from the textbooks and courses ready to "teach" you. How ambidextrous does one need to be to produce and sell, "putting on" a serious face, some randomly selected segments of video or audio recorded real-speed speeches in a foreign language& asking you to try to repeat them -- simultaneously or subsequently, it's all the same, really -- after professional narrators? You're promised "mountains of gold" and "big success" in exchange for banal money.

Education, especially in the West, has been totally commercialized. But you will probably never read about it in any newspaper. You cannot learn pronunciation, rhythm, or intonation at all, by trying to catch words just by listening or watching. To digest it, you need to significantly slow down and go segment by segment on an error-free basis.

Why am I so interested in American English? Because it's the world's most difficult language, considering the level of difficulty of mastering pronunciation and spelling. The second most difficult language is Chinese. If you can master English, you can master anything!

Using any SupremeLearning materials -- whether books, videobooks, audiobooks, or software -- you will be able to grab the system's essence. And on your own -- as many people around the globe have already done -- you will be able to learn any foreign language -- or better your own native language -- much faster.

There's nothing more difficult in the world of language improvement than trying to master American English -- no matter who you are, a native from a place where they don't speak "standard" English, or a highly educated foreigner. Nothing will help you without drastic slowing down of the learning process, attention paying to each sound, and close-to correct reading out loud. Details of this are disclosed in each of the SupremeLearning courses.

I restate that on the world market of language learning and improving, there are not many exercises or recommendations from which to choose other than:

• Inattentive listening to instructors on audio or video recordings,

• Relative or real speed-reading -- a hazardous process for anybody trying to master any difficult language, because once you have a habit of reading fast, you will never be able to master any language until your habit is broken, which up until SupremeLearning came along was almost impossible,

• Incoherent "rambling" after a professional narrator recommending that you start rapidly speaking "in your new language" prior to your having learned how to pronounce words correctly, and

• (Whether with a businessperson's face or false enthusiasm) creating your own "home made" spoken or written texts.

These methods are being sold on the market under such slogans as:

• "Sit back, relax, and learn",

• "Learn languages quickly and effortlessly",

• "Listening is all you need to do",

• "Use the whole brain approach",

• "Let us do for you a neuro-linguistic programming",

• "If you want to learn how to speak, speak! If you want to learn how to write, write! If you want to learn how to comprehend, listen!"

• "Perform deep diving into language" (meaning that no translation, not even a hint, is ever offered; this is a very special kind of marketing trick where the material has been composed in such a way that you will never figure out the meanings of most of the words given in the course) (sometimes this approach is accompanied with baroque music), and

• "It's like having a personal trainer".

How would you like to try out some "dirty" conversing by, over the course of 5 hours, being inundated with a man and a woman yelling at you in English like brokers on Wall Street? The main approach is for you to keep speaking broken English, not to pay attention to errors, and then, sometime in the future, supposedly you'll get better on your own; you'll naturally speak with fewer and fewer errors.

There's nothing else in the "consumer's basket" to be brought home and consumed. All that "ingenious thought" of the authors of the revolutionary, accelerated, rapid, fast, quick courses hasn't yet flown high. But every "popular" course follows one or more of the above-described routes.

Why? Nobody -- not regular people, not language instructors, not natives, not foreigners -- knows how to:

• Master pronunciation,

• Improve vocabulary,

• Teach perfect spelling, nor

• Teach adults quality reading out loud, using a skill of imitating educated (or any other) speech patterns.

But without acquiring the skills of correct sound reproduction (phonetic and articulation modification), standard rhythm and intonation imitation of educated model speakers, no progress can be made on language improvement. That these can only be learned by slowed down demonstrations of articulation patterns of the actual way one can produce all those strange sounds is still not grasped by teachers and students.

Remember, unless you are a natural super-learner by osmosis, you are incapable of learning just by listening, watching, reading, or conversing. Starting in youth, the older you get, the more you are programmed by nature to share knowledge, not to receive it. As an adult, unless you can restore your learning abilities -- imitation, in particular -- to the time of your childhood, you will not be able to significantly and rapidly improve your American English, nor any other language, nor any other subject.

Part 3

Undoubtedly, if you haven't learned to converse as an educated person, you will not be accepted in high-class society either. For the rest of your life you could be considered by intelligent individuals to be a hillbilly or "that dumb foreigner" -- no matter how smart your thoughts are internally. I've seen it happen too often with people with higher degrees from foreign countries (whatever be the native and new countries).

Learning any new, or mastering any "old", skill requires, not just the learning of new movements, but the recognition by one's brain of the verbal descriptions of what needs to be acquired. Otherwise, you cannot improve your language skills and you cannot learn how to learn anything effectively.

One more fact: the market of language improvement is not an area where paying more gets you more. There are only a handful of instructors -- mainly, voice coaches who work with their clients one-on-one for many months -- who are capable of modifying another's speech patterns. It may seem funny, but in the 21st century you have fewer chances to really learn anything than you would have had in the 19th century.

American language instructors who do not flawlessly speak any language other than their own should be assumed incapable of teaching foreigners English, because they will likely totally misperceive the problems of any foreigner. They don't know how to master their new language either. They have acquired, naturally (i.e., not through books or courses, but just by being born or living in America for years), some level of English but most of them are -- like you -- hopelessly stuck on their same level. So they certainly have no idea how to teach fellow Americans or foreigners.

There are a lot of good language users in any country, but there are next to no instructors who can actually pass their personal knowledge on to adult (I repeat, older than 14) students. It's a whole different specialty in being able to master a language oneself and being able to pass knowledge onto others. Most grammar and stylebook creators don't even remember exactly what they have written and if they don't, that means they surely have no system of learning (e.g., memorizing) themselves!

Most of them cannot apply their own written rules and principles in real life. They might be expert writers, but usually are not speakers, and certainly are not patient and effective teachers. They are too smart for amateur learners; they don't understand their problems. The narrow specialization of teachers, writers, speakers, and narrators can be partially blamed for such an unbearable situation with language improvement of all kinds in the 20th, and now, in the 21st century. You see, all forms of language can only be mastered simultaneously. Specialization prevents that.

Foreigners who start learning the American version of English at ages older than 14 to 16 are totally incapable of mastering that subject. No matter how intelligent they are, no matter what colleges and courses from which they have graduated, for the purposes of language learning, they are adults, like you. They, themselves, usually need interpreters, translators, and narrators.

Ask the authors of English courses from your native country to pronounce or spell any (complex for you) words, and you will see that I'm right. Try to imagine: most foreign instructors cannot even perform the exercises from their own manuals! They don't want to torture themselves because they know of the worthlessness. Anyone with enough money to publish commercials and produce infomercials is a perfect instructor, ready to teach!

I've been publishing my articles and books for a number of years and, by now, many instructors have read them. So why haven't they gotten better? If they were just lazy and didn't want to improve, that would be a good explanation, but the truth is, they can't master their own language skills because they aren't using the natural law of learning techniques, and then they continue to shamelessly pretend that they know how to teach others!

Most instructors (American or foreign) have the same problem improving their own vocabularies and spelling, just like any regular individual. But, in the course of the last century -- the century of fast or super-learning -- they have miraculously learned how to sell their courses. They are professionals at selling courses even if not in instructing people. They are shoemakers who are still not wearing any shoes. Most foreign authors of accelerated courses and methods, for decades, haven't mastered their own American English. Something funny is going on here. They are trying to convince you of the following: I'm a brilliant teacher! Who cares if I can't ride a bicycle because I've taught thousands of people to ride a bicycle. I don't need to demonstrate any superior skills! But I can teach you superior skills.

If you create a course of writing English, you must be capable of teaching writing, not just be a good writer, yourself.

If you want to teach people spelling, you must be an excellent speller, know how to improve your own spelling skills, and know how to instruct others.

If you teach phonetics, you must know phonetics (practical usage as well as the roots from which they derive) yourself. Isn't it crystal clear!? Maybe it is for us, but not for language or other humanitarian subject instructors. The American system of education nowadays does not exist to teach people. For students' own money it allows students to learn on their own while keeping "educators" posted and "clients" tested. The market has killed good language instruction. When most foreigners or American parents demand from instructors "just something", the system gives them that and nothing more. If people instead started demanding only good quality courses and refused buying charlatan and falsely revolutionary, intensive, accelerated, etc. courses, the market would create some good quality language instruction products. For now, we have to deal with amateur paraphernalia.

Part 4

The Host: Not long ago, I read the following in the international bimonthly newspaper "Top Secret". This is a literal translation but I warn you that the language is sometimes messy. [Bold is in original.]

"In the 70s in Bulgaria under the leadership of Professor Georgi Lozanov they tried a new method of stimulating the creativity of humans. About 30 volunteers were selected for the experiment -- totally healthy young people. Males (intelligence service officers and counterintelligence service officers), females (stewardesses). They were supposed to acquire many different skills, among which were accelerated courses of foreign language learning. The first results achieved were even better than expected. But the experiment had to be halted: doctors found in those they supervised not only neurological, but also hormonal related, disturbances.

" 'Psychotherapist Professor Todor Dichev, a scholar participating in the experiment, recalls that after three to five years, many of the experimentals [student participants] got seriously ill -- physically and psychologically. Men started developing a feeling of continuing premature fatigue, aggressiveness, memory gaps; step-by-step, their brains were seemingly getting totally exhausted and later felt that death was coming after them. Women had other kinds of unhealthy deviations: hormonal changes, malignant tumors.... Different methods of treatment could help to stop the processes, which were becoming only deeper. We watched the experimentals during seven years, at the end of which not one of them was still alive. Can you recall, that they were people with iron health...?'

"Why did it happen? Going over limits with body energy resource spending led to abatement of the immune ability of the body. It was in a sense a psychoenergetic AIDS."

Could you comment on that?

Shestov: It's a tough issue. The information is astonishing. I didn't know that Dr. Lozanov's research had ever led to a total termination of all his "experimentals". Possibly it is some formerly classified information. If you remember, in the 19th century an advanced technique for acquiring a foreign language was first described by Mr. Charles Berlitz. That technique was further developed by Dr. Georgi Lozanov. Lozanov's techniques were widely used at Moscow University by Prof. Kitaigorodskaya (one of the Soviet Union's "titans" of intensive language learning). A recent rendition of that particular learning technique for acquiring a foreign language was published by Paul Pimsleur.

In the last two decades, Ms. Sheila Ostrander and her partners have written a number of books and created and/or endorsed courses glorifying Lozanov's research, stating in one of them ("SuperLearning 2000") that Dr. Lozanov is the founding father of the modern accelerated methods of learning. Many American, British, Australian, etc. language course authors and school organizers are seemingly very proud to mention Dr. Lozanov as their mentor. I don't know the details of all results achieved by Berlitz, Lozanov, and their followers, but I know that their commercials are very convincing.

I want to stress one thing. I always advise my colleagues (those trying to accelerate the process of learning languages) "not to bend a stick or it will break" and to try -- on themselves -- all the questionable accelerated learning techniques. The language-learning process definitely needs to get accelerated. But every natural scientist must be very careful -- and think twice before using new methods on their clients.

In any case, a new student should not jump to a new course and start receiving big portions of information immediately. They need a "warming up" period.

I've tested on myself big and small portions of all the major newest methods of accelerated language learning. I've come to the conclusion that an unprepared brain, in a way, is "fighting" the attempts of instructors to "inject" into it any new, incomprehensible or strange information -- especially when the instructors are trying to teach intensively, i.e., much faster than the brain has been used to.

The brain "gets mad" when forced to repeat the same "smart procedures" dozens (or even hundreds) of times. Things could get especially bad when a student's brain starts distinctly saying "enough", but the "natural scientist" keeps forcing the same exercise, all the while the "disciples" are still seemingly stuck on the same level of speaking, comprehending, conversing, and writing in the language that they are trying to learn or improve.

I think, even if the student's brain really records something as a result of using some innovative accelerated learning technique created by people who do not know what they are doing and haven't tried it on themselves, that "the something" (meaning all the data "retained" by the student) is being mostly stored in the brain in the passive form -- and we still have the case where nobody knows how get it out of there.

In my long experience as an educator and methods-maker I have learned that the more times you go through the same "made up by natural scientists" exercises -- e.g., "speed-reading", "speed-listening" of whatever, inferior quality "speed-talking", or "speed-writing or typing" in the language one wants to improve -- the more damage may happen to your brain, your health, and your ability to learn or improve any subject or skill.

In addition, you may also develop some incorrect, unhealthy "condition-reflexes", i.e. strong habits. For example, you could begin to "care less" about your loathsome patterns of articulating sounds and spelling badly, and your "monkey-like" level of comprehension of any texts (with which you would be forced to work after going through an "innovative" course). An old saying goes, "Repetition is the mother of learning." Well I'm here to tell you that repetition can be a bad influence on learning.

Part 5

The Host: It's amazing how well everybody understands that if you allow anybody (even a child with a tenacious perception and ability to self-improve) to play piano with errors that that person will not ever become a classical pianist! But when it concerns the language improvement process with adults...

Shestov: Yes, unfortunately, many people don't quite realize that initially inattentive listening or viewing of words will always remain the same, and reading texts out loud in broken English will never develop any acceptable skill of conducting a conversation. "The loathsome quantity" will never be transformed into quality! An adult brain is incapable of evolving in that kind of direction. Whatever you have repeated incorrectly today will always be repeated by you, automatically, tomorrow and in 10 years.

One must avoid multiple, one-type, inferior-quality repetitions. Fast and effective American English learning and improvement is impossible without acquisition of:

• Correct pronunciation,

• Creation in oneself of good quality skills of imitating the patterns of educated speech,

• Quality (attentive) reading out loud and to yourself, and

• A deferential attitude towards each and every word, incorporated fully into one's life.

The Host: It seems that without a skillful instructor those needed to improve their level of American English cannot do it. Everybody knows that just by studying on their own with audio materials, using a regular speaking speed, and books, the system of phonetics cannot be absorbed. I want to support my conclusion with a letter from your student, who's obtained one of your international video and audio courses.

"Maybe we should switch from a car with square wheels to a car with round wheels?

"I came to the United States awhile ago. In my home country I worked as an architect. My knowledge of American English was next to nothing. I wanted to find the most effective way to learn English.

"And immediately upon arrival I encountered the biggest obstacle: How to read and pronounce English words. Audio and video courses pay to that subject incomprehensibly 'modest' attention. The international phonetic transcription (apparently first created by British colonists for Indians -- because it's really primitive and imprecise) is just one more -- intermediate -- form of English and itself requires an unclear amount of time for learning. Books cannot speak comprehensibly and intelligibly.

"Multiple modifications of speaking electronic dictionaries say words and phrases with the speed of regular speech, making it impossible for any intelligent individual to catch and reproduce the words correctly.

"For two months in a row I kept attending one of the numerous courses where you are forced to repeat after an instructor -- anyhow you can. This is how deformed and faulty knowledge is being cooked. After such 'learning sessions' people learn in-depth, not the real language, but only some rudimentary germs of English-Spanish, English-Chinese, English-Russian jargon.

"I continued searching. And one day I came to Michael Shestov's SupremeLearning American English center. I watched and listened to the fragments of his video- and audiotapes created by him and his partner. And I immediately realized: that was exactly what I had really wanted to find.

"The foundation of the Shestov-Paris system is learning a skill of correctly reading and pronouncing any English word. That objective is being accomplished with the help of incredibly slowed down -- ten to thirty times -- multiple narration (with speeds intermittently changing between normal and slow) of each of the most complex English words as a part of complex sentences. All that has been recorded by Michael Shestov and professional narrators in flawless "idealized" standard American English.

"Any beginner or advanced learner can, segment-by-segment, comprehend by ear and eye, then read and then perfectly pronounce any word. A new ability for human beings is being born by using their organs of speech in a perfect -- from the beginning -- manner.

"Many new avenues for self-studying languages with the use of a whole arsenal of techniques and learning aids have been developed by the center of Shestov-Paris.

"It still remains unclear why, with such an overwhelming advantage of SupremeLearning over other existing courses, it is not being widely accepted and used by the language instructors around the globe. Incorporation into any course, or learning structure, even a couple of elements of SupremeLearning would drastically improve its effectivity.

"Humans did not immediately invent a round wheel. And now, being positioned on the seat of an automobile, we are not speculating about why wheels are round. So why do the world teaching institutions, at least a vast majority of them, continue trying to ride using square wheels, stumbling and graduating people with damaged-from-the-beginning languages of their new home?

"How many resources -- how much time and energy of millions of people -- are being dissipated totally for nothing?

"I think that not using the SupremeLearning techniques is not the most rational way of educating people in such a great country as the United States where, because of the incredible effectivity of the industrial technologies, the best in the world results of the economy should be the outcome as a whole."

"O. Tripolsky
Bronx, New York"

Part 6

The Host: Mr. Shestov, you seem to make an impression of David trying to fight a Goliath...

Shestov: I want to thank Mr. Tripolsky and thousands of other SupremeLearning students for their understanding, support, and acknowledgment. Yes, I am having a difficult time trying to educate people in how American English should be learned. Being a consumer advocate in this complex -- possibly even intentionally complicated -- field is a tough road to hoe.

It's very hard trying to help my colleagues under conditions of seemingly total "misunderstanding" of the natural principles of learning (and, thus, teaching).

If I weren't an international journalist, I wouldn't be able to convince even a single soul that there isn't any reason to be proud or arrogant about the way American English or any other foreign language is being taught nowadays. I, at least, get the word out somewhat. But what about the few instructors who do actually know American English and can teach, but are not able to reach their potential in teaching students, nor have their achievements made public, because they don't have the forum that I have? Why is it that the big corporations overlook those few instructors and instead choose to sponsor only the teaching structures that propagate ineffective learning methods?

For example, who would believe a traditional language instructor, or a schoolteacher, if they said that Americans cannot teach their own native language to a foreigner? ...That they don't understand the problems of an "out-of-country" person? Your countrymen cannot teach you American English because they haven't mastered it well enough, themselves, to effectively teach others.

The truth is, you can buy on the market only inferior quality courses created for "an uneducated mass amateur customer", who will never complain. There are no effective methods of humanitarian knowledge acquisition in America. All you learn, you learn on your own. The amount of money you pay to instructors or language colleges matters not; you are still personally forced to find the necessary data, memorize it, and try to retain and use it. There are no actual methods of memorizing, retention, and recall -- they only exist in the infomercials and school prospects. There are a lot of smart commercials, but up to 95 percent of foreigners, including the highest educated part -- foreign journalists -- haven't learned proper English -- neither in 5, nor in 25, years of living in the country!

The Host: There's nothing else left than to wish Americans could learn how to teach foreign American English instructors to master their language skills and so forth. And now the main question is, what prevents us of mastering American English?

Shestov: The existing educational system, like Orwell's Big Brother, intentionally or not, keeps watching you while trying to prevent any kind of drastic breakthroughs from talented "innovative" instructors (not belonging to the accelerated mainstreams) trying to spread their learning/teaching techniques.

Why? Because real teaching is hard work! It seems that only using the Internet will provide equal opportunities and real competition. If schools and colleges have money for commercials and can attract students anyway, because, no matter what, they will get their paychecks, why should they improve their learning techniques? The problem of teaching adults could easily be solved, if the educational structures really wanted to.

A key also lies in the human genetic code: An adult brain functions totally differently from that of a child. Children naturally and effortlessly imitate behavior and speech patterns of adults. But most all grown ups must be specially (re)taught those skills; they don't have the imitation abilities any longer. Adults lose their abilities or subconsciously resist any kind of quality imitating of other adults, whom they think are their equals. Precise speakers are not considered to be the authorities to follow. In fact, it is considered childliketo exactly copy their behavioral patterns. Unfortunately no "buts" can really help: but adults have a foundation for forming associations (associative thinking); but they possess the basic knowledge of human history and culture; but adults are assiduous...

The Host: There is a well-known story about a chimpanzee that couldn't learn how to crack nuts, when he, at the age of 6, started living among his own species. He couldn't learn that skill at all, despite the fact that all his fellow adult apes constantly tried to demonstrate to him how that task (easy for all of them to perform) could be accomplished. No amount of incorrect out loud repetitions of text after a "model" speaker will help a student reduce their accent or learn proper English.

Shestov: Absolutely correct! The commonly used methods of instruction -- such as "enjoy your meal while learning, by listening to audiotapes or watching the instructors on TV", "listen, read, and repeat along with a narrator" -- without preliminary acquisition of the Americanized way of pronouncing words cannot work effectively. Even thousands of hours of practice won't help one make any progress! One cannot say that an adult brain works with an inferior quality; it just works in a different way, following different laws of knowledge acquisition. That's why teaching non-adolescent humans successfully requires a different instructional approach, one that is more "perfectionistic", one that is based on striving for intelligent pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation. Adults need "absolute literacy", a skill had in childhood that allows the individual to write and spell grammatically correctly without knowing/remembering any written rules whatsoever.

An adult needs to have their learning abilities -- meaning, a skill of being able to concentrate on new, unfamiliar, unintelligible written or spoken data -- restored through, for example, a complex improvement or total reconstruction of their ways of articulating foreign sounds. Moreover, instructors need to devote to that pronunciation-mastering process not just 20 to 30 minutes per day, as they usually spend, but at least 16 to 20 hours during a 5 to 7 day period. (All this is dependent upon using correct exercises, of course.)

You see, an adult shall not be allowed to pronounce and write down foreign words incorrectly. But that goal can only be reached by drastically slowing down the speed of presenting the learning materials -- to even as slow as 1 word per minute -- while, using any available means, providing quality work on the mouth muscles and vocal cords, or through, for example, the style of writing being bettered on a computer keyboard.

How can we implement that scheme? Any error that is easily noticed in the classroom or at home shall be "punished" by making students repeat the entire mini-exercise all over again. Until pronunciation has been truly mastered, they should not be allowed to say loudly any imperfectly pronounced words. The most important issue to address is adults' being helped to regain their ability to learn; that is, they need help in acquiring the skill of quality imitation of any strange flawless mouth muscle movements and error-free copying of grammatically perfect written texts.

I would like to stress the following: all American English courses -- whether geared towards learning from scratch or towards improving some level -- must begin with introductory phonetic-articulatory learning sessions (classes), conducted by language instructors exclusively on an error-free basis. Only then, may the student be allowed to study in the "audio-language laboratory" or at home with headphones in their ears to absorb grammar, style, polysemantics of words, etc. Dramatically reading out loud the complex, professionally required texts and other types of exercises must also accompany the regimen.

Those who acquired English "the natural way", by learning English in America from an early age (the same way an American boy or girl does) don't understand the problems of their former countrymen; thus they are likely incapable of translating well from and into English, and of teaching others! In their heads have been formed two independent "language archives". If you, as a foreigner, after taking any of the routinely primitive (auditory or self-study) language classes, would have learned something, but would have acquired simultaneously a "habit" of "switching off" (while conversing with Americans) your native language archive, your brain would forever be capable of operating only with that, inferior quality, primitive vocabulary! Your brain will not be able (during any "regular speed" conversation) to extract any knowledge from your previous "foreign" life experience! Most intelligent foreigners will not settle for that kind of "low in intellectual calories" vocabulary "ration".

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79 Pine Street #188, New York, NY 10005, USA

Our phone numbers are:
toll-free: 1-888-259-7401, 1-800-880-2287 & 1-877-466-7925 (for US residents only), 1-800-557-7763 (for US & Canada residents only) or
direct: 1-917-208-7434 & 1-917-208-9964;
fax: 1-253-981-1477
email: info@supremelearning.com,
info@learnhowtolearn.com or info@learnhowtolearnandteachfast.com

You may send us a request for written information or to make an appointment for a phone consultation. Don't forget to give us your name, contact phone, the city and the country where you want the products to be delivered and proposed method of payment. Within 3 business days an English speaking administrator of WVP will contact you to discuss all possible purchase and delivery options.

For information on how to order courses, please click here.

Notes: Learning how to learn effectively is the first step towards opening the universe of knowledge. The superior effectivity of SupremeLearning is continually being proven by the actions of "rivals", who have established inferior schools in a few big cities of the world, some have illegally bourn the names of SupremeLearning, Gin I. Paris, Michael Shestov or Michael Shestov [the latter is a literary pseudonym of Michael Shestov who is an International Investigative Journalist in the field of Education] and have been distributing illegal copies of the courses, thus compromising the real SupremeLearning and slowing down the process of the real system-wide spreading throughout the world.

Beware of fake courses and schools. Please, report such cases to Michael Shestov personally at mshestov@supremelearning.com and get a $50 discount on auditory courses in New York or $10 discount on any public seminar given in major US or Canadian cities in the years 2012-2013. For reporting such cases, we'll be glad to offer additional discounts on any auditory or self-study course.

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