Why is it Difficult to Achieve Fluency in English ?

There's been a month since we had an insightful interview with Arkady Zilberman about learning English and we just opened a topic of a language learnign software which he created and patented, called Language Bridge.


I'm sure that many of the followers of the blog downloaded the software which Arkady has kindly offered for a free trial. I'd invite everyone who tried it out to send us their feedback, either via comment or Aktivator newsletter.


What I'd like in the second part of the interview is to talk  more about how Language Bridge can  help  adults  overcome major problems when learning English. Let me refer to the recent survey on this blog which revealed that  your major problems when learning the language are:


1. memorizing words (40%)
2. speaking fluently (34%)
3. grammar (33%)


Marina Petrović: Arkady, which problem shall we tackle first ? 

Arkady Zilberman: Let's start with the second problem: 34% of your blog visitors note that they can't
speak fluently and apparently it is their objective that eludes them. Majority
(40%) think that the main difficulty in acquiring fluency is memorizing words,
and then next difficulty most frequently quoted is grammar.

Dear friends, you should not blame yourselves that the conventional system
of learning foreign languages misleads you and all answers in the above
questionnaire are inaccurate. If you will follow the recommendations of your
school or college language teachers you will have approx. 4% success rate in
acquiring fluency in English.

By James J. Asher, Ph.D.
© Copyright 2001

But don't let past bad experiences get you down!

As a matter of fact neither words nor grammar should be learned in a traditional
manner trying memorizing long lists of words or numerous grammar rules in
your native language about English. It would not work!

Listening to English is not enough; you can't learn playing piano by listening
- you should practice playing piano for hours and hours. The same is true for
acquiring fluency in English - you should practice it using special written lessons
based on most frequently used words, for example, lessons which come with the
Language Bridge software. You learn new words in real life sentences while performing
three actions at the same time: silently reading the text, listening in the headset
and repeating as close to speaker as possible. In this manner our main problem
in learning English - cross-translation to the mother tongue will be turned off
automatically. The Language Bridge software incorporates the support in Serbian
by using Google Translation service, so don't worry that you will not understand
new lessons or new words.

In the course of multiple repetitions of emotional and interesting texts your brain
is permanently looking for English language patterns and forms an inner ear
grammar that functions perfectly in our native language and will do the same job
when you will start producing English sentences with the natural fluency.

You can't learn grammar first and then start speaking English fluently, most
people fail on this path. But if you start practicing English from the very first
lesson, then you acquire natural fluency in English and grammar comes as a free
gift because we speak by word chunks, so-called collocations and blocks and your
brain acquires the English language harmony (you may call it grammar) on a
subconscious level.


To be continued...
Serbian version