Radical English crash course

Attention: Teachers, professors, trainors. I discovered two quick ways for beginners to learn English without having to take a formal course as a graduate school professor of Communications in several schools in Manila and as an adventurer hitchhiking through Europe for three years in my younger days, forced to learn basic French and German on the road.

School-based Learning.

Teaching communications at the college level, I discovered a simple way in my crash course. Most of my students from the provinces had very poor English skills. They were as analytical and creative as those who spoke English well, but they had low skills in English. During oral reports, they refused to stumble through English, begging me to let them speak in the vernacular. I had no choice, but I was determined to teach them a fast way to learn English.

My strategy was simple. I required them to read one book a month and give a book report. They chose the books, but I had to approve them, as they might have chosen a complex book they could not handle. I gave them a list of simple books.

The book report format was simple grade-one stuff. Part 1: Give a short summary on what the book was about, three to six paragraphs, that was all. Part 2: List the new words you learned without giving their meaning, just the words. Some had a hundred words, the lazy ones 20 words. But they slowly enriched their vocabulary this way. The words stuck in their brains.

Grammar was learned not from rules of grammar memorized but from usage. Usage was the magic word, not rules. They didn’t say “I is” and “you is” because, from reading, they encountered “I am” and “you are” and they retained this in their young brains. It was learning from inference.

They learned about metaphor and contrast not from definitions but from examples. They absorbed idiomatic expressions without knowing their definitions.

It came from the students themselves that they were learning fast. After five books read in one semester, they said their English skills had improved ten-fold. They were so thankful that they had learned English in this radical way.

On-the-road learning

On the road, hitchhiking through Europe during my youth, I realized I needed to learn French fast as I entered a five-star beach resort somewhere on the outskirts of Marseille.

I had hitched at ride in Coimbra in Portugal with a British scuba diver. It was my longest single hitch – two whole days. We stayed overnight in Marseille and continued on the next day. We faced a dilemma. He was booked in a five-star hotel I could not afford. So he dropped me off at a five-star beach resort and picked me up the next morning.

Earlier, I anticipated my need to learn French quickly, as the arrogant French would not reply to English questions even if they spoke it. So I bought a pocket-size English-French dictionary. At the beach resort, I hoped to sleep on the sand and avoid any security guards.

I stood out as I entered with my long hair, backpack, and torn ski jacket. A group fell silent and stared on, seeing me. A lovely lady in tight shorts approached me.

I took out my dictionary to try to ask a question. She laughed on seeing the dictionary. But she admired my effort to speak in broken French rather than in perfect English. I said, “Nuit dormer ici,” no tenses, no grammar, just a mix of root words and infinitives. But she understood, and smiled. Instantly. She spoke with the security guard to let me, her friend, sleep in one corner of the beach for just one night. Problem solved.

My crash course in French entailed memorizing key words without care for grammar. Phase 1 was learning the basics like the number system, for buying food, and simple questions like “where, who what, why, how much” etc. Phase 2 was more conversational like “where is the market,” “when is the train or bus coming?” Just put the subject, object, verb in any order, they understood while laughing in admiration.

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