Learn to speak English in 10 days flat

Kochi: Call it a magic formula. A Kerala resident claims he can teach people how to speak English fluently in exactly 10 days.

Jacob Nettikkadan, a 68-year-old philologist, claims to have innovated a technique of teaching English that has now found favour with the Kerala education department. He says with his magic formula a graduate can start speaking English on the fourth day itself.

Nettikkadan has been doing research on this technique for the past 45 years.

Nettikkadan chucked his job as an export manager in Kolkata 24 years ago and began a short-term course on how to speak English in 10 days.

"I ran this course in Kolkata for nine years. And for the past nearly 15 years I have been teaching people here. By now I have trained more than 5,000 people from various walks of life," Nettikkadan told IANS.

He offers a 10-day residential course for an all-inclusive fee of Rs 5,000. Each batch has 30 students. Every day his session runs into nine hours.

Even if a student wants to go home after four days, he insists that in the remaining six days of the course the student has to speak only English at home. That is why he insists that the course be a fulltime residential one.

"In 10 days, the learner gets 10 times more knowledge in the language because the method of constructing 1,877 types of sentences in English is through 1,877 usages of verb - one type of sentence based on one usage of verb.

"This system will revolutionise future language learning and research to make it simple, interesting, fast and productive, irrespective of its nomenclature or country of origin," said Nettikkadan.

His efforts have now been recognised by the Kerala education department, which is now preparing a five-year-plan to introduce this system in the training curriculum.

"If a student is a graduate, then it is easy to pick up, if not, then it takes a bit more effort to speak English fluently," he said.

Impressed by his technique, American Richard Canandy, who is an accomplished teacher of English, will assist Nettikkadan from the next batch.