“My family’s lived in London since the year dot. Donkey’s years ago, my brother moved into the sticks, but he’s thinking of moving back and he wants to look around. So, next week, I’ll put him up for a few days. He’s untidy, but I love him, so I bite my tongue and put up with that. While he’s here I’ll ask him to give me a hand to put up my new mirror on the wall. It’s very heavy, but it’ll be a piece of cake with two of us. As an administrator he’s the bee’s knees, so if he takes the plunge and moves here, I’ll put him up for president of the tennis club. He’s a good bloke and is raising some money for charity, so I’ll put up a few quid; but I’m feeling the pinch at the moment and I don’t need my clapped-out old bike, so I’ll put it up for sale.”
Did you understand everything you heard and read? Maybe you could guess at some of the meanings, but what exactly do these idioms mean? Speak Easy helps you to break through this code to true understanding.
There are thousands of English teaching institutes and English language centres out there who say they will improve the English language skills of their students. I bet many of you may have been to one. If you are one of those, or know friends or family who have, dare I ask you, what was the result? Have you or your friends or family started speaking fluently? Almost certainly the answer to that will be “no”!
The reason for this is that in many places English is taught in a very traditional way and it only helps you revise the English you learned when you were at school. Don’t get me wrong, if you are a non-native speaker the High-School, English-teaching method is great and it helps improve your reading and writing skills but when it comes to speaking and listening this is where it isn’t so successful.
We’ve spent hundreds of hours doing careful research by speaking to English language experts and listening to the advice of non-native students, who can now communicate in fluent English, and have designed this course with the confidence that, if you use our materials and study hard, you too will be able to speak English more confidently and fluently at the end of it.
Learn to speak English with our spoken English course from $29.90
Speak Easy helped me gain that confidence to speak English. The idioms, phrases and slang that i learned helped me a lot to understand language spoken daily by native English speakers.
I find many courses about learning English online but they were all aimed at absolute beginners. What I wanted was a program to improve my fluency in English language and Speak Easy "Speech recognition technology" helped me wonders with achieving this goal.
Real English Conversations:
Our conversations are all designed to be in natural settings. These involve daily life conversations between two native English speakers, such as a conversation on “Buying a Car” between Jane and Michael or a conversation on “Going on a night out” between Adam and Lisa.
Native English Audios:
The conversations come with audio recordings. You listen to the audios between native English speakers and familiarise yourself with their English accent. You can also adjust play back speed and listen to these conversations at your own pace. This is of great benefit to help overcome listening issues that you get when watching English movies and programmes or listening to English music.
Mini Lessons:
Our conversations are built around idioms, phrases and slang that is commonly used by native English speakers in everyday life and that non-native English speakers with a good grasp of English can fail to understand. Hundreds of Mini Lessons explain the use of these idioms, phrases, expressions and slang. Some of these expressions have different meanings in different settings and our Mini Lessons aim to cover these.
Vocabulary Quizzes:
The quizzes are designed to help your practise what you have learned. On average there are up to 65 vocabulary questions with each conversation so you can get to know how to use all these expressions in different settings. The vocabulary quizzes are designed so that you can attempt them more than once until you are confident that you’ve understood the commonly used English expressions, phrases and idioms.
Speaking Practice:
We use state of the art speech recognition technology to improve your speaking skills. We’ve designed speaking questions for you to practise. Once you’ve spoken into the microphone, you will get an immediate response on your pronunciation, accent and phonetics. This technology is carefully chosen so you can learn to speak English correctly. Speech recognition technology gives you feedback on how to make the right sounds of the words you’re saying and helps you to speak more clearly, so your listeners should never find it challenging to understand your accent.
Listen to brief, daily life conversations between two people.
Adjust the playback speed if you find the spoken words difficult to understand.
We use the latest speech recognition technology to help you improve your speaking skills.
Listen, repeat & get instant feedback on your pronunciation accuracy…
Each conversation contains more than 50 highlighted terms and expressions.
A pop-up mini lesson is one click away, displaying definitions and examples.
A Vocabulary Test in each conversation covers almost all the mini lessons.
Test what you’ve learned and get immediate feedback!
Book a speaking session with a native English teacher.
Improve your speaking skills and get live feedback
1. LISTENING
Speak Easy is built around conversations between two people. You read the text and hear the text recorded by actors. Each conversation contains more than 50 idioms, and lasts for 4-5 minutes. For your convenience, each conversation is also broken into individual lines, so it’s easy to replay a certain line. Playback speed can be adjusted if you find the spoken words difficult to understand.
Associated with each conversation is a catalogue of mini-lessons – one per idiom. A mini-lesson explains the idiom and provides some examples of usage. It is likely that you are already familiar with some of the idioms, so you only need to review those that are of interest to you – no need to sit through lots of “stuff” you already know.
Also associated with each conversation is a quiz. The quiz covers almost every idiom used in the conversation, and invites you to type the missing word/s.
2. SPEAKING
Speak Easy uses the latest speech recognition technology. Almost every piece of text that you read and hear is designed so that you can repeat what you hear and get instant feedback about your pronunciation. For example, in the speaking quizzes, instead of typing your answers, you can SPEAK your answers. You can choose to be an actor in a conversation and play one of the roles – listen to the native speaker, then SPEAK the line yourself and get instant feedback. We encourage you to do this as much as possible, to get the “feel” of speaking conversational English. You don’t learn how to ride a bike by watching someone else ride a bike. You must do it yourself. Practice makes perfect!
So – using the two elements – LISTENING and SPEAKING – we introduce you to an ever-growing catalogue of idioms, phrasal verbs and slang.
We make no extravagant claims such as, “Within 2 hours you will learn the inside secrets of speaking English like a native.” We do not believe in silver bullets (a magic solution to a problem). We are confident though that we’ve designed our course such that if you listen to all our conversations, read through all mini lessons and practice speaking daily, you’ll feel the real difference in your spoken and listening ability in very short time.
Not sure which course to choose? Get in contact with one our team members to get advice or a tailored offer
I wanted to improve my pronunciation and polish my accent. Speaking quiz speech recognition technology and feedback from native teacher helped me identify problem with my language and helped me take my spoken English to higher level
Working in a multi national company. i really needed to improve my English to network and build relationship across different teams. Speak Easy helped me achieve my goal. Worth every penny!.