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 Listen & Answer 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!
Good luck and have a great New Year!