This piece of writing is from a retrospective point of view so I just wish to speak nostalgically about my English method. I supported myself here teaching English very well. Extremely well and I had a large marketplace and perfect reputation. And then I didn’t. Did I mess up? No. The Russians moved in and it became something different for me to teach people English or for people to actually learn English. Interesting bit of nationalism. But, this is nostalgia here so let’s go back to the days when we all loved each other and the town just could not get enough of me.

About the teaching method, it was not built on other teaching methods but just based on an observation that I made concerning the students. Firstly, everyone made the same exact mistakes. In terms of grammar they had all learned badly a few things that would have been helpful in their speaking except that they were never given the opportunity to speak. Regurgitating information or saying the correct thing is the way things are done these days. Creative writing? What is that? The answer to the problem or the creation of a problem. But that was the whole point. They all complained that they could not talk.

In essence, I took whatever second language education was and I decided to do everything backwards. Whatever a standard class would require of a student, I would go completely against the grain. Basically this meant that I needed to teach people how to make sentences. And I do not wish to insult anybody but, if we are talking about Russian speakers trying to put their English game together for real, there is some genuine effort necessary before they can understand logical lines. They don’t know how to do it. In fact it’s infuriating to them to have to say more after they had formulated such a perfect three-word answer. Believe me, I’ve had people physically threaten me when I tried to explain to them that a decent study of the English language required a few more words.

So what is Practical English?

PE for newbies is a pretty straightforward class introducing the concept of basic English grammar. In order to learn English, from the very beginning, you have to understand the order of words and the pronouns and the understanding of the verb be. We can perhaps understand have and then with this basic structure, we can begin making simple observations. Single phrases. And of course here we have the best ladder I’ve ever created.

Artificial sentences. There is a funny trick that you can play with English grammar once you understand exactly what it is inferring and we have a common point of focus to speak of. English does not work well in abstract despite the fact that Russians seem to love living in an abstract way because Russian fits so perfectly. Go figure. The point is we can make any part of a single phrase artificial simply by demanding that something be there. We can choose the subject or change the subject and demand that the sentence fit the new subject. We can put a verb in there and then find a subject for that verb that makes sense. But better, we can change the quality of the verb in terms of time. Exactly what grammar would we like to use? Exactly how it would we like to explain the situation?

The book

While you are getting used to putting together sentences and good logical themes together, you have a friend in this class called the grammar book. This is a book that sort of wrote itself over the years. It started as a simple list of things that Russian speakers always make mistakes on. Also some of the more difficult questions of pronunciation are all put together where a few minutes of practice and you understand it. I decided to simply solve the problems instead of dwell and make exercises of each although, you can make exercises out of everything in the book. Mostly though, it’s a compilation of grammar book and dictionary segregated into different parts of speech. You will find the verbs to the left part of the book and the nouns to the right part of the book and most of the grammar class for beginners is explained verbally in the center. 28 pages and it’s magical really.

Okay, I’m not overstating it. If you’re looking for a word, sometimes any word is enough to trigger your thinking. And you can open up the book to any page drop your finger down and find a concept and that could just as easily be your next sentence. Seems to work every time.

So in this way, we make a marriage between understanding grammar and doing simple improvisations on subjects. What is your opinion of this situation? We read some literature where the hero comes to some conclusion and then we stop the reading and we talk about it. We discuss the characters situation. If we were him what would we do. It’s possible to practice this in first person or in third person. You can also practice it in second person if you like being offensive and like working on that game.

The point that I tried to make was that you don’t really need Russian at all to help you make your sentences. What you need is to get your game together in terms of snapping together phrases logically and speaking in a tone that says you know what you’re talking about. You get good about giving evidence or at least real fears and where those fears would come from. Being able to explain yourself well is a very powerful thing. I think so anyway.

And the results? The basic class being necessary because the student has no English skills but is willing to do the homework seriously for an hour a day without playing games, would take somewhere between 3 and 6 months to be at reasonable competence in English. School kids who were serious sometimes caught it later in the year when the classes were more relaxed and more about reading something or putting something together. The sort of university level discourse that of course, they don’t have in middle school. Why not?

Why does it work? It works because it can’t not work. If you practice reading, this means absorbing material with a single reading, even out loud reading, this means you understand English. If you can pick a target of interest within the subject matter we are talking about and lay down a few logical thoughts why this subject should be interesting, this makes you a very smart person. And if you can be smart in English, I think they call this reasonable competence. I’ve had students angry at me because I was so-so but the state programs said they were geniuses. Sorry. It worked.

PE for people looking for a voice in English

Well, going forward It’s hard to say with practical English is supposed to be or what kind of people we might serve. The materials to learn how to do artificial sentences is available in a single book. The only question is, do you have enough competence to put together a reasonable article about a theme of some importance? Can you write an essay in English that you completely believe and know will be understandable to any English speaker anywhere? If you have your game together but are not really sure if you are world class, let’s go! Let’s get to work!

It’s not just abusive and redundant repetition. It’s beautiful and agonizing repetition. If you are trying to hammer out a specific style of essay and it takes you two or three times to get it, I know this is frustrating. But if you just get your basic forms together, if you understand how the logic structures set up in advance, you’re working with stories that are already written before you write down a word. It’s a bureaucratic and that’s the truth. And that is a beautiful place to arrive in. I suppose you could use it to be a bureaucrat. I don’t think that would make me happy to hear about this but it wouldn’t be the first time. Why not?

And it works. It works because it can’t not work. So, practical English. Going forward, give us a call and we’ll see if we can put together something interesting to help you get where you’re going.