Contents of polyglot English lessons in 16 hours. Polyglot

The intellectual reality show of the Kultura TV channel is an intensive course in learning English. The teacher is a real polyglot, who speaks more than 30 languages. This is teacher Dmitry Petrov - psycholinguist, simultaneous interpreter, teacher, author of the book “The Magic of the Word”. There are 8 people in the group of students.

Participants: actors Vladimir Epifantsev, Anna Litkens, Daria Ekamasova, Alexandra Rebenok, Anastasia Vvedenskaya; jeweler-designer Mikhail Milyutin; art critic Alisa Gorlova; writer, screenwriter and host of the "Cinema Magic" program Oleg Shishkin.

Here's what Petrov himself says about this interactive course:

“To master the English language perfectly, even a lifetime is not enough. To learn to speak professionally, you also need to spend a lot of time, effort and energy. But in order to simply learn to understand people, to be understood, and most importantly to get rid of the fear that many people have that inhibits any desire and opportunity to express themselves in language, this requires no more than a few days.

What I offer you, I have experienced on myself and on quite a large number of people. I am a professional translator, linguist, I do professional translation in a number of languages, and I teach it to others. And, gradually, a certain approach and mechanism was developed. It must be said that there is such a progression - each subsequent language requires less effort and time.

A week is enough for any language. What is language? - Language is A New Look on the world, the surrounding reality. It's the ability to switch, to make a click. And just like in a receiver, we change one program to another, tune in to a different wave.

What is required on your part is motivation (the desire to travel, something related to the profession, learning and communication, it could be friendship or love)"

At each lesson, what has been learned is consolidated and new grammatical and lexical material is introduced. By the end, students have mastered basic grammatical patterns and can use them fluently in their speech.

Dmitry Petrov's method is not to start a language, but to penetrate it, to feel comfortable in a new language environment.

Click on the image to view the lesson

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Hello! The reality show “Polyglot”, which was launched by the TV channel “Culture”, caused a great resonance in society. What caused the increased public interest in this project? Already from the title you can guess that we will talk about a foreign language, or rather English. But first things first.

What is the value of the Polyglot project?

The format of this show provides the opportunity for viewers not only to observe the successes of the participants, but also to actively learn English themselves during the same 16 lectures. That is, you can also watch the video, read additional materials, complete assignments and start speaking English in a few weeks.

The developer of the “Polyglot” system and the teacher of 16 English classes is a famous linguist, polyglot (30 languages!) - Dmitry Petrov. The goal of the project is to teach English in 16 hours. Petrov’s method is to penetrate English and feel comfortable in this language environment.

A group of 8 students, most of them famous people, participate in the intellectual show. All participants in “Polyglot” either do not know English at all, or have a vague understanding of it from school.

In any case, they will have to learn English from scratch in 16 lessons. Already in the 1st lesson, students begin to learn new words and try to communicate in English. With tension, long pauses, with mistakes, but still progress is immediately noticeable.

16 killer hours of English

In all 16 lessons, which last no more than an hour, participants recall and consolidate what they have learned, then learn new group words and phrases. New lexical and grammatical material is introduced. By the end of the “Polyglot” course, in 16 hours, students master basic grammatical patterns, are easily explained in English, and use complex phrases correctly.

We will provide you with 16 video lessons intellectual show“Polyglot”, as well as auxiliary test materials that will help you consolidate the material faster and more effectively, as well as tips with the correct pronunciation.

Each lesson is discussed in detail in a separate article.

Watch a series of 16 Polyglot English lessons

Have you already completed training in the Polyglot system? Have you managed to learn English from scratch? What was the most difficult thing during these 16 hours?

The project participants proved by their own example that this system is effective, that you can learn English from scratch in just 16 lessons! The main thing is desire, perseverance and a lot of work. But is the result worth it?!

Download Additional materials to the lessons at the link below.

Please share your opinions and feedback in the comments.

An intellectual reality show on the TV channel "Culture", an intensive training video course "Polyglot" consists of 16 lessons - English lessons, the goal of which is to learn to speak English. The developer of this unique system, as well as the teacher during all classes, is Dmitry Petrov, a well-known Russian linguist, translator, polyglot, who speaks thirty languages.

Polyglot. English in 16 hours.

To master the English language perfectly, even a lifetime is not enough. To learn to speak professionally, you also need to spend a lot of time, effort and energy. But in order to simply learn to understand people, to be understood, and most importantly to get rid of the fear that many people have that inhibits any desire and opportunity to express themselves in language, this requires no more than a few days. What I offer you, I have experienced on myself and on quite a large number of people. I am a professional translator, linguist, I do professional translation in a number of languages, and I teach it to others. And, gradually, a certain approach and mechanism was developed. It must be said that there is such a progression - each subsequent language requires less effort and time. A week is enough for any language. What is language? – Language is a new look at the world, the surrounding reality. It's the ability to switch, to make a click. And just like in a receiver, we change one program to another, tune in to a different wave. What is required on your part is motivation (the desire to travel, something related to the profession, learning and communication, it could be friendship or love)

Watch all Polyglot lessons. Learn English in 16 hours for free on the Fascinating English website:

It’s probably difficult now to find someone who is interested in the topic of study foreign languages and I haven’t even heard briefly about the sensational “Polyglot” program, literally blew up the TV and Internet space several years ago.

In this article we will try to figure out whether this technique proposed by Dmitry Petrov is effective and what pitfalls it hides.

First of all, let's start with the fact that the purpose of this article is not to belittle or insult the wonderful teacher and researcher (and we sincerely believe so) Dmitry Petrov, or, God forbid, to try to shine at the expense of his authority.

Let's immediately agree on our position - Dmitry Petrov is a truly talented linguist who has made a certain breakthrough in the field of teaching English grammar (primarily English, although issues dedicated to other languages ​​are already available) and has managed to help many people get off the ground in learning a foreign language

For those who, for some reason, are not familiar with the Polyglot program, we recommend that you briefly familiarize yourself with it at this link.

So what do we then want to say with such a slogan as “Dmitry Petrov’s system does not work!”

First, let's look at the Polyglot course's approach to learning grammar. In a nutshell, as a show experiment they took 6-8 people with almost zero or very weak level of English proficiency and, over the course of several episodes, the structure of sentence construction in English was explained to the participants in a schematic, extremely adequate and down-to-earth form, a system for changing endings in verbs depending on tense, etc.

What was the success of this TV show? After all, almost every good teacher practices similar approaches to one degree or another. The secret of popularity was precisely in its apparent simplicity, quick presentation and assimilation of information. The participants, in whom we recognized ourselves, literally grasped on the fly grammatical structures that had seemed unusually complex since school.

The system itself, in general, is brilliant in its simplicity. Indeed, everything is laid out on the shelves, understandable, intelligible, convenient and recommended for familiarization to any person who has started learning English from scratch.

However, what pitfalls does this approach hide? Often, when talking on the phone or conducting an interview with another potential student at our school, we are faced with the following questions: “What do you think of Dmitry Petrov’s methodology?”, “Does your school offer training in the Polyglot program?”, “Petrov teaches English in 16 hours, do you have the same accelerated courses”, etc. Perhaps some of our readers will find such questions strange, but at our school we hear them all the time.

Frankly speaking, such questions always baffle our team. And that's why. At its core, Dmitry Petrov’s system is a schematic, maximally simplified format (by the way, this does not mean that it is bad) for presenting basic information on the structure of the English language for a beginner. And everything wouldn’t be bad, it would seem, what’s wrong with conveying information to a beginner more clearly and legibly? But here one problem comes up - the slogan of the "Polyglot" program is "English in 16 hours."

Perhaps it is this slogan, and not the filling, that primarily fuels the audience’s interest in this format of training. Well, you must agree, if you need to get from point A to point B and the distance between them is 1000 km, then what format of travel will you choose - a bicycle, a car, a reserved seat on Russian Railways or an airplane? I think that if we're talking about o maximum effective use of your time, then you will stop by plane and cover this distance in a little more than an hour.

The same situation occurs with the perception of the format of the Polyglot program. A person who has decided to learn English and is studying the situation at the suggestion of different schools, I look at private teachers or tutors - here the "Elementary" course offers me to complete 4-5 months. And with Dmitry Petrov it is done in 16 hours. This results in a certain logical inconsistency. It seems like, why take 5 months to do something that can be done in 16 hours of work, roughly speaking 1 week?

This leads to the search for some kind of “magic pills” for not knowing English, which you can drink over the course of a week and become a “Polyglot”. Unfortunately, the reality is that the literate and healthy message of schematically understanding the seemingly complex grammar of English times has turned into a distorted understanding of the original idea.

The "Polyglot" program with the slogan "English in 16 hours" gave hope for quick and painless results, the achievement of which, let's be honest, requires at least 1-2 years of concentrated work.

Such a slogan stands on par with phrases like “Pump up your bicep for summer”, “Pugacheva’s secret diet. -30 kg in 1 week”, “Getting rid of hypertension with the help of our miracle powder”, etc.

And this is not the direct fault of Dmitry Petrov (although from a marketing point of view it is obvious that the program was created precisely with the aim of attracting as many more audience due to such a slogan). Here lies the mental trap of our mind, which wants to get everything quickly, painlessly and with minimal investment.

Here I would like to go into more detail and note 2 key points that people who decide to learn English in 16 hours are unaware of:

1.Any grammatical structure, whether it is a change in verb forms, a scheme for constructing sentences, a scheme of statements/negations, requires development and implementation into the format of mechanical memory at the level of automaticity.

Dmitry actually talks about this in the very first issue. However, this information is usually not perceived consciously. What is the use of the fact that you have figured out how to construct a sentence in a diagram. Will you be able to speak more or less freely now? Well, with the right degree of intelligence and quick thinking, you can. Only very slowly, with a notebook and with “ekanyas” and “akanyas”.

You must understand that any scheme, even if it is presented as clearly as possible, requires systematic repetition in speech, practice in dialogues, reading aloud, memorizing some fragments and listening. This is what all the remaining months of Elementary level training are spent on, in addition to the proposed 16 hours. Such skills cannot be consolidated in a day or two. this takes several weeks, and the final formation of the skill takes about 3-4 months. And we're only talking about basic level! What is 16 o'clock?

Most people don't think about this. thinking of language as a skill, like riding a bike or playing solitaire. It’s like you took it, learned it and that’s it - you won’t forget it.

If you are also tempted by the desire to learn English in 16 hours, then understand that there are things that will not happen ahead of time, even if you crash into a cake. A woman cannot give birth to a healthy child before 8-9 months. It's the same here.

By the way, the same 16 hours of study in the “Polyglot” format with a lesson duration of 1 hour and 2 times a week gives a minimum of 2 months of classes. So 16 hours here should first of all be understood as a publicity stunt.

2. Vocabulary.

Many people also don’t think about the fact that language is not only about grammar, but also about an insane amount of information in terms of memory load and volume of information.

Let's even assume that in 16 hours you have perfectly mastered the basic grammar of 4-6 basic English tenses and can even construct sentences in your speech relatively freely (although practice shows that 9 out of 10 people are not capable of this in such a period of time).

What words will you use? :) An initial, basic set of words with which you can communicate on basic topics and understand the answers is at least 500-1000 words.

I repeat, 500-1000 words. To imagine the volume of such information, try learning 30 words a day for a week. At the end, after 7 days, all other things being equal, if you are not doing only this, you will most likely have a mess in your head.

To create such a volume vocabulary for most people it takes from 3-6 months to a year (depending on the level of diligence and perseverance of the student). Therefore, again, no “English in 16 hours” will save you from having to learn this basic vocabulary.

And if we are talking about confident command of English at least at the intermediate level, then this is already 1500-3000 words. This level is achieved in 1-2 years.

To summarize the main essence of the idea, I did not want to say that Dmitry Petrov’s system is bad, ineffective, or complete quackery. The problem is its perception by many people who are looking for freebies in the format of putting on a bracelet and being healed, drinking magic powder and building muscles.

We must understand that learning English, no matter how much we would like the opposite, is a long and systematic process that takes different people from 1 to 5 years permanent job. And even having reached a certain level of language, it is required to keep it alive active form and constant practice.

And the Polyglot format systems are just excellent and modern help on this path, designed to facilitate the process of language acquisition and remove certain psychological complexes about learning English, which many have had since the days of poor-quality language education at school.

But this system cannot serve as a panacea and the only source of education. If you really seriously want to learn English, then it’s better to start by finding a good, proven school or find a teacher and start learning. Yes, it may not be so fun and easy. Or maybe the process will go smoothly for you. No one knows. But one thing is certain - there are no magic pills and only you, with your diligence and perseverance, can achieve the goals that you have set for yourself.

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A real gift from the famous linguist Dmitry Petrov and the Kultura TV channel. A video course of 16 lessons, after which you will be able to speak English. This is the most useful English course for beginners I have ever seen. Below is the text of the video. Watch and read, you won’t regret it!

Good afternoon Today we will begin a course that will take 16 lessons. Our goal is to learn to speak English. To master a language perfectly, even a lifetime is not enough. To learn to speak professionally, you also need to spend enough time, effort, and energy. But in order to simply learn to understand people, to be understood and, most importantly, to get rid of the fear that for many inhibits any desire and ability to communicate in language - I am sure that this will take no more than a few days.

What I offer you, I have experienced on myself and quite a large number of people: I am a professional translator, a professional linguist, I do simultaneous translation in a number of languages, I teach this to others... And gradually some approach, some kind of mechanism has developed... And it is necessary to say that there is such a progression: each subsequent language requires less effort, less time.

- How many languages ​​do you know?

There are 7-8 main European languages ​​with which I constantly work as a translator and as a teacher. Well, there are 2-3 dozen other languages ​​that I can speak in a situation where it is necessary.

- And what, you learned all these languages ​​in just a few lessons?!

Yes, if we are talking about the second category of languages, this is absolutely true. A week is enough for any language.

Let me explain what is required for this. After all, what is language? First of all, language is a new look at the world, at the surrounding reality. This is the ability to switch, that is, to make a click - just like in a receiver we change one program to another - to tune in to a different wave. What is required on your part is, first of all, motivation. It could be just a desire to travel, it could be something related to a profession, training, or communication. It could be friendship and, finally, love.

Now we will try to figure out what was stopping you from learning the language along the way. Because you might think that we are talking about some kind of miracle: how can you speak a language in a few days? In my opinion, the miracle is different: how can you learn a language for months, years and not be able to connect some basic things in it? Therefore, I will ask you to start by giving your names and in a nutshell, say what has been a significant difficulty for you until now, why don’t you still speak English?

- My name is Michael. First of all, there was no incentive for me to speak. And at school, when I was going through this whole thing, at some point I missed it, then I didn’t understand it and...

This is a fairly typical argument, because most of you know a huge number of English words - consciously or subconsciously, but English words hover everywhere. But they can be compared to a scattering of beads, which themselves are scattered, but there is no system. The lack of a system prevents you from using words effectively, so one of the basic principles of my method, my system, is to create this thread, a rod where you can string all these beads.

Please, what is your name?

- Daria.

How was your relationship with language?

- Well, to be honest, it seems to me that only laziness prevented me from learning it, because, in principle, I already started teaching it all the time in kindergarten, and I still don’t know, although I have the desire. Now I really want to learn English!

Well, laziness is a state and a quality worthy of respect. We must accept everything that is in us. Because fighting laziness is unrealistic. Therefore, I want to tell you good news: in addition to the fact that our course is quite compact (it’s not years or months, it’s 16 lessons, by the end of which, I hope, if you help me and take a step forward, you and I will simply speak English) you will have to do some things on your own, but another good news is that you won't have to sit for hours and do some homework. Firstly, because it is unrealistic - no adult will ever do any homework for hours, no matter what he does.

I will ask you to repeat for a few minutes each day certain things that I will ask you to do at the end of each lesson. I can't believe you don't have 5 minutes 2-3 times a day to repeat certain structures. What is it for? The amount of information that is really worth mastering, learning, cramming into yourself does not exceed the multiplication table. It will be necessary to bring several basic structures to automation. What does it mean? Bring them to the level at which, for example, our legs work when they walk, how the structures of our native language. This is quite real.

Please, what is your name?

- My name is Anna. The formal approach prevented me from learning English. Because I actually did well in school, and the generally simple things we studied boiled down to patterns that I can’t use when I meet a real person. Now, for example, a man from Dublin came to visit us, and I feel that there is no full communication taking place. I’m offended, time is running out... At the same time, I remember that I know everything, I have a 5 in English: the table is white, the wall is black, everything is fine, but there’s nothing to say!

Resentment is a very powerful motivation! OK, thank you! You?

- My name is Vladimir. I'm just ashamed. I feel bad when I can't express myself. I understand that it is quite relaxing, as I once had, I was talking to an Englishman after a couple of beers - I could communicate with him easily. For some reason, I didn’t like studying since childhood. I had the feeling that I knew everything. I have a feeling that I also know English. Sometimes in my dreams I speak easily and understand everything. Sometimes watching a film in English, I fall asleep and begin to understand it. But I could never learn to speak.

- My name is Anastasia. It seems to me that my lack of immersion in the environment is hindering me. Because when I start teaching myself and studying from books, these patterns begin: what comes first, what comes next, all the verbs... I can’t improvise anymore, I always remember this pattern in my head and think that I need to substitute it there.

Absolutely right! Our goal is to ensure that this scheme does not need to be remembered.

- My name is Alexandra. What probably bothers me is that there is a huge spectrum different techniques and schools. I have a huge amount of information in my head, but I still can’t talk about the past, future and present. I get confused in these forms and, naturally, after 10 minutes my interlocutor says OK... :)

Well, maybe you are generally philosophical about time?.. As the course progresses, we will put things in order.

- My name is Oleg, and I have a certain horror, of course, about irregular verbs...

The beginning was similar: my name is Oleg and I’m an alcoholic :)

- I’m scared all the time, it seems to me that I can’t concentrate on the language, which, as it seems to me, I now know at the level of “yours, mine understands.”

- My name is Alice. I was always hampered by laziness and lack of time to go to courses and simply restore the language in volume.

Language in general, quite rightly, should be perceived as something three-dimensional. Any information that we receive in a linear form (a list of words, a table, a diagram of some rules, verbs) - this causes what we call the student syndrome: learned, passed and forgotten. For comprehensive language learning, it is not enough to know the words; you need to feel your physical presence in new environment. Therefore, an image and some kind of emotional attachments and sensations must be connected. Now, if I ask you a question offhand, when they talk about the English language, what association comes to mind? Here English language- what came immediately?

- Envy! When I see children who speak English...

From childhood and for free :)

- And I remember the book. The Shakespeare edition is old, old! At my parents. Such a brown cover... I’ve been leafing through it since childhood, thinking, oh my God! And fields overgrown with heather...

Heather honey :)

So the first schema is the verb schema.
The verb in every language is the stem. Moreover, it must be said that when we talked about the number of words that need to be mastered, there is the following statistics: regardless of our age, level of education, or the language we speak, 90% of our speech is 300 - 350 words. By the way, from the list of these basic 300 words, verbs occupy 50 - 60 words (depending on the language).

According to the logic of using verbs, we can talk about either the present, the future, or the past.
We can either affirm or deny something, or ask or ask a question.
And here we get a table of 9 possible options.

Let's take some verb. For example, love. The functionality of the verb is given by the system of pronouns:

I, you, we, they, he, she.

You love means “you love” or “you love”. Sometimes they mistakenly claim that everything in English is “you”. Nothing like this! In English everything starts with “you”. There is a word for “you” in English, but it is only used when addressing God, in prayers, in the Bible, etc. This word is thou, but we won’t even write it down, because it’s a rare native speaker who even knows it.

Now, if the person is 3rd, then here we add the letter s:

In any language that we take on, in my opinion, it is necessary to give all forms of the verb at once, so that we can immediately see the three-dimensional structure. It’s not like today we learned it, a month later - the past tense, a year later - the interrogative form... All at once, in the first minutes!

Read more about times in the article. There's a video there. Dragunkin explains everything very clearly :)

To form the past tense, add the letter d:

I loved
he loved
she loved

To form the future tense, the auxiliary word will is added: I will love; he will love; she will love.

- What about “shall”?

Canceled. For the last 30 years, “shall” has been used in legal/clerical language.

- So when we were taught it, it had already been canceled?

It was no longer there!)

And here we have the affirmative form of the verb.

- What is “it”?

“It” no. There is no word “it” in English because there is no gender. The Russian language has masculine, feminine and neuter gender, while the English language has none. The word it simply means “this” and has nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, many who were taught in school that he, she, it are three genders, remained in this misconception. There is no gender in English! There is one common genus. He and she are words indicating a person's gender, but they are not grammatical gender. In Russian it is big/bolshaya/bolshoe, in English it will all be big.

That is, if I play with the word “it” (it) in some literary way, like in Russian, they won’t be able to translate me?

Absolutely. Therefore, we have to look for some other means.

…
Negative form: don’t is added:

I/you/we/they don’t love; he/she doesn't love.

Negative form in past tense:

I/you/we/they/he/she didn’t love.

This structure is the most important, the most difficult, the very first in the English language. Once you have mastered it, it’s like mastering half the language.

Negative form in the future tense:

I/you/we/they/he/she will not love.

Interrogative form in the present tense: DO, DOES is added.

Interrogative form in past tense: DID.

Interrogative form in the future tense: WILL.

The result is a system of coordinates: first I decide whether I AFFIRM, ASK or DENIAL, then I find out whether it WAS, IS or WILL BE?

Here is this list, in which there are 50 - 60 verbs that every person constantly uses (there are, of course, 1000 others, but they occupy 10%). There are regular verbs: love, live, work, open, close... But there is another half of the verbs, which is called and causes awe and horror, because from childhood everyone remembers these tables with three forms, hundreds of some verbs...

So, in fact, in the basic list that we need to master and bring to automatism, there are half of them, that is, 20 - 30 irregular verbs that we need to master. Let's take the irregular (super-irregular) verb see:

I don't see. It doesn't

Nothing has changed yet...

And only in one case (a statement in the past tense) out of 9 possible cases does the “obscene” form saw appear:

This is the form of the verb that is written in brackets: see (saw).

Moreover, irregular verbs can only be very common, because in the course of history they are used so often that they are inevitably distorted.

The third form of the verb, which we will get to later, is the participle (seen, done, etc.), so it must be lumped together with the verb form.

In all other 8 cases - correct or irregular verb- doesn't matter.

Tell me, are “he came” and “he came” the same thing in English?

The concept of aspect (perfective aspect / imperfective aspect) exists only in Russian (Slavic languages):

Come, come

This is not the case in English:

He came – he came; He came

You take a verb and run it through all these forms. This takes from 20 to 30 seconds. Then take another verb. When mastering structures, regularity of repetition is much more important than the amount of time. It is very important. You will see that after 2-4 lessons this structure will work automatically.

Is this diagram clear? There are several more schemes that are simpler, smaller in volume and more understandable. But everything is based on this scheme, so it needs to be brought to automaticity. When you try to speak, this is the first thing to do. And you either need to spend time and energy on this to glue it together on your internal monitor, or make sure that it works on its own, for you.

With regular repetition, after a few days, this structure will begin to work automatically, which may not have happened for many years.

Usually this is given very piecemeal and the relationship is not explained. When there is no one three-dimensional picture, problems arise that haunt many people for years.

With this we will finish our first lesson, and I really hope that you will find a few minutes to try to move this structure towards automation. Goodbye!