No, they wouldn't be. In fact,
everybody who wants to achieve fluency must
buy the Fluentzy books and do a self-study
course with the help of those books — and not only
people who can't find alternatives. The reason is
this: Practically speaking, are there any effective
alternatives to such a self-study course at all —
if your aim is to learn the fluency skill (and
not to just learn English)?
Just think. What are the alternatives
that are actually available? Actually, there are only
two alternatives that are worth considering
at all:
1.
Living and working in an environment where people
normally speak English
Is this a practical option for an educated adult learner?
As we've already seen, this option would take a few
years or more for you to become fluent in everyday
English alone. (See the answer to Q8). And the value
of this option depends on several other variables.
All these factors make this option not a practical
one for most adult learners.
2.
Classroom coaching
As we've already seen, this
alternative is not an effective one - if your
aim is to learn the fluency skill. The value of this
option depends on several other variables. And above
all, this option has certain built-in limitations,
and these limitations can make this option have a
bad effect on your fluency efforts. (See the answers
to Q6, and Q7).
3.
Other methods
Of course, there are one or
two other options that might look like alternatives,
but they're not really alternatives at all.
For example, doing translation, listening to cassettes
(containing readymade sentences), and learning readymade
sentences by heart from books are not even
options worth considering - if your aim is
to speak English fluently. These options will
only help people who are trying to learn English.
Of course, many people don't realize this truth -
until after they've tried these methods and
failed.
Let's now briefly look at these other
methods:
(i)
Learning by heart: Impossible
Mind you, you can't learn all the 'speech units' (or
'sentences') in a language by heart, and then
reproduce them as and when required. You see, there
are millions and millions of them. People don't, and
can't, speak that way. And you can't anticipate all
the contexts and situations you'll have to speak in.
You can't tell beforehand what kinds of questions
others might ask, or what replies you might like to
give, or how a conversation might progress.
This is one reason why ready-made
sentences and cassettes won't make you fluent. So,
if you want to become fluent, you must gain the skill
of producing speech spontaneously - on the
spot.
(ii)
Translation: Impossible
Mind you, you won't be able to speak English fluently
by translating.
You see, the effort to translate
would stand between your thought and your speech as
a block. So translator-speakers first think
in their mother-tongue and then try to translate their
thoughts into English. Their thoughts do not come
out directly as English speech. And as long as their
thoughts don't come out directly as English speech,
they can't become fluent.
Here are three of the chief reasons:
The 'structures' of most English
speech units are not similar to the 'structures'
of the speech units in other languages. For example,
the order in which you arrange the elements in an
English speech-unit is different from the way you
do that in other languages.
Most of the core-words, collocations
and conversational expressions in English don't
have equivalents in other languages.
Several words, collocations and expressions
in other languages don't have equivalents in English,
either.
Mind you, the effort to translate
takes away your attention from the 'matter' of your
speech, and forces you to concentrate on the 'manner'.
And then you stop thinking about 'what' you
want to say, and start paying attention to 'how' you
say it. And then, you automatically falter, and your
speech-flow automatically stops.
And you see, translated English sentences
sound awkward and stilted. They don't sound
natural - like the real English spoken by native speakers
of English.
(iii)
Cassettes: Not helpful
Audio/Video cassettes containing ready-made sentences
won't make you fluent. No, they won't. Of course,
if you listen to them for hours and hours, you may
be able to learn a few isolated sentences by
heart.
Remember this: Cassettes like these
contain ready-made sentences that have been edited
and polished (and not naturally-occurring ones).
And ready-made sentences are precisely the things
that won't help you - if your aim is to achieve
fluency in spontaneous speech. What you need is not
the skill of reproducing ready-made sentences in stereotyped
situations, but the skill of composing your speech
and speaking at the same time - no matter what the
situation is. The skill you must get is the skill
of making up newer and newer speech units off-hand,
as you speak along. The skill of filling time with
talk. In any situation - depending on the needs
of the situation.
Spontaneous speech is always produced
under pressure of time. You speak in the 'here-and-now'.
You have to connect what you're saying now to what
you've finished saying. At the same time, you have
to be thinking about, and preparing, what you're going
to say next. You'll be able to do all this, only
if you know the techniques of 'on-the-spot speech
composition'.
Cassettes containing ready-made sentences
won't teach you these techniques. In fact,
these cassettes give you a false impression: They
make you think that spoken English is made up of ideal
strings of complete and perfectly-formed sentences.
They make you think that you'd be able to speak English
if you learn a few one-line sentences. They
don't bring you face to face with such features
of spontaneous speech as starting trouble, false starts,
repetition of syllables and words, hesitations, pauses,
pause fillers, gambits for creating planning-time,
incomplete structures, unfinished word groups, reformulations,
refinements, backtracking, silent editing, etc. They
don't give you the skill of speaking 'exploratorily'
and 'manipulatively'.
Fluentzy
system: The only practical option for educated adult
learners
When all these alternatives
are out, and not acceptable, what alone is
a practical option - an option that can work
successfully?
The Fluentzy system, of course.
You see, the most important thing
the Fluentzy system does for you is this: It
gets you to learn a large number of things on which
the fluency skill is based. In this way, it gets your
fluency skill to develop from a firm foundation, rather
than in a disorganized or haphazard way — without
any plan or order. There are a lot of isolated pieces
of fluency-related language knowledge lying scattered
here and there in your mind. The Fluentzy books
bring them all together and organize them into a systematic
body of knowledge for you inside your mind. And they
add a lot of other fluency-related aspects to that
knowledge. And they help you learn a series of fluency
techniques and help you train in them and put them
to practical use in real-life situations.
Now, about the things that the Fluentzy
books teach you, understand one thing. This is very
important. The things that the Fluentzy books
teach you, no other books teach you. So remember this:
Other books and other people may be able to teach
you several things, but not the things the Fluentzy
books teach.
The Fluentzy books are copyright.
The author & copyright holder is Prof. KevNair,
and he has given the licence and right to publish
them only to us. Mind you, it's illegal for anybody
else publish them.
