It is beyond the purpose of this short introduction to shed an unfavourable light on deficient language teachers, but let me nonetheless warn you about two types you might wish to avoid. The first group comprises teachers who do not really know what they do, as language teaching is one of the rare professional activities where people are allowed to teach a process which they haven't experienced themselves. When a surgeon teaches a colleague how to perform a cardiac bypass operation, he has done this type of operation hundreds of times. See one, do one, teach one - this rule is sacrosanct in most disciplines, but not in language teaching. If you book a vacation to attend English classes in private schools in London or French classes in Paris or Spanish classes in Seville, the odds are substantial that your teachers will have a perfect knowledge of one, but only one language - their own - and will themselves never have been through the cumbersome process of mastering another language. The risk of encountering such 'monoglot' teachers is particularly high in English-speaking countries. Spontaneously, a series of questions come to mind: Do these teachers know what it means to absorb 5,000 to 15,000 words? Can they imagine how it feels to nail 20 to 50 new words into your brain every day? Do they have the faintest idea of how demanding it is to penetrate the dense thicket of high-speed human speech? Do they simply presage the thrill of discovering a new language? In summary, do they have an appropriate comprehension of the complications and implications of language learning? They probably don't. So if your language classes in Paris, London, Berlin, or Seville, are meant to be more than meeting and mingling opportunities with people from all over the world, make sure that your teachers are polyglots. You wouldn't want to learn sex with nuns and priests.

The second group of teachers you should avoid are those who do their job because they didn't get the job they wanted. Their first choice was perhaps to be a musician, a philosopher, or a writer. But life is unpredictable, dreams don't always materialise, and in order to make a living, some people accept the role of a language teacher. After a short period of frustration, most of these 'against-their-will' teachers will settle into their new life and excel in their profession. However, a minority do not, and will lack the essential skills for teaching a language: energy and enthusiasm. While in other professionals, for example real estate agent, woodcutter, or mortician, a lack of enthusiasm may be irrelevant; in teaching it is not. Don't agree to content yourself with anything less than passionate and wholehearted teachers. You have decided to become fluent in another language, you are ready to invest years, and your desire is to achieve the top. Frustrated teachers are infectious individuals who could contaminate what is one of your most valuable resources: motivation. Protect it.

In order to get a clearer picture of language teaching and, consequently, of how to avoid bored and boring teachers, let's address a list of the services teachers should provide. Traditionally, language teachers trained and checked six core competences: vocabulary, understanding of speech, production of speech, reading, writing, and grammar. As we have seen in the Words chapter, vocabulary training is inherently a lonely job because nobody except yourself can transfer thousands of words into your brain. In what is the most important single task of language learning, teachers can do nothing for you.

The second most important task is speech recognition. Until relatively recently, language teachers were often the only individuals at hand to produce human speech in another language. That has changed radically. In modern times, human speech is ubiquitous, at every corner of your life and in any language you want. As a consequence, audio CDs, audio books, Internet news, and TV, have supplanted teachers as prime speech sources.

The impact of teachers on the third, fourth and fifth tasks - speaking, reading, and writing - is equally limited. Writing comes as a bonus of reading, reading as a bonus of word learning, and as you will see in the Speaking chapter, correct pronunciation comes as a bonus of hundreds of hours of listening. Grammar is therefore the only domain where language teachers will continue to play a certain role in the future.

Grammar - the climax of excruciatingly boring language lessons, and a torture for teens? As an adult, please consider grammar rehabilitation. Grammar consists of a fairly limited number of rules that tell you how to modify words and how to arrange them to form correct and beautiful sentences. More importantly, a big chunk of grammar - verbs such as to talk, to love, to play, etc. - can be outsourced to pure memory exercises, which reduces the duration of pure grammar lessons even further. As these verbs are immensely important in many languages, let's dedicate a couple of pages to it.

Verbs usually denote action (learn, listen, read), occurrence (forget, decompose), or a state of being (love, exist). To English native-speakers, they do not seem impressive because, with the exception of a small number of irregular verbs such as go-went-gone, write-wrote-written, etc., the English verb system is disarmingly simple. All we can press out of to want are two variations, wants and wanted. Just put a few auxiliaries around them - have, shall, and will - and you will have created all the tenses and moods you need.

Other languages are more complicated. The Italian equivalent, volere, needs 6 different forms... just for the present tense:

Now that you have outsourced the study of verb forms to autonomous learning, grammar per se shrinks to a set of about 30 problems to settle. If you followed my prescriptions in the first chapters - 1) Learn 20 or more new words per day; 2) Listen to human speech for at least one hour per day - all I would ask you at this point is to rapidly assemble the knowledge that is needed to recognise the most frequent grammatical structures. Just recognising grammar requires 10 times less training than producing grammar. Even allowing for a few tricky rules, you will be electrified to acquire these passive skills in a few weeks and to discover that grammar is a fairly manageable thing. You will be happy to learn:

• how to use nouns (boy, girl), adjectives (tall, small, pretty), verb tenses (I go, I went, I have gone, I shall go, etc.), and a limited number of pronouns (I, you, he, she, me, him, her, my, your, his; to name only a few);
• the order in which to arrange the words in a sentence;
• how to count and to ask questions;
• how to localise things in time and space.

Important advice: Make sure that you receive grammar lessons in your native language. Reject all 'monoglot' proposals such as being taught Spanish grammar by a Spanish teacher who exclusively speaks Spanish. Don't complicate your life. Your native language is by far the best tool for grasping and understanding new concepts.

The experiment was a startling success. It nicely showed the feasibility of a fast introduction to grammar, and also opened the perspective of reading newspapers or magazines, which is clearly more enjoyable and motivating than reading language manuals. The key to success is freedom. With words and verbs nailed into his brain, T.'s mind was free to concentrate on grammar. No struggling to remember the meaning of words, no stumbling over verb forms, and consequently no getting bogged down with the variable sets of grammar sludge: the plurals of nouns, the accords of adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, numbers, and adverbs of time and space. Freedom from mind-boggling chaos.

Now that grammar teaching will slowly shift away from snail-pace speed to repetitive rounds of ultra-fast overviews, let us try and redefine the part that teachers can play in your language project. In today's environment, the best role for a language teacher is probably that of a coach. Depending on your previous exposure to your native and subsequent languages, your coach will prepare an individual time schedule for your project; recommend books, podcasts, audio books, and broadcasts; provide the first round of grammar; advise you on how to manage your daily word quota; teach you how to check that new words have arrived in your long-term memory; and demonstrate common pronunciation pitfalls. For the first few weeks, you should plan daily lessons or two or three lessons per week. Thereafter, reduce to weekly encounters. Finally, after the third or fourth month, one or two meetings per month will be sufficient. During the entire course, check the motivating power of your coach. If you have the feeling that he doesn't motivate you or, worse, makes you feel like a donkey, fire him.

Finding good coaches can be more difficult than finding good doctors, because the reputation of teachers is less transparent: doctors operate occluded heart vessels in hours and treat syphilis within weeks. Hence, successes and failures are rapidly visible, which is not the case for language teachers. But doctors and teachers have a common trait: overmedication. Many doctors will prescribe antihypertensives, statins, or antibiotics - to name just a few - even in situations where reduction of weight, diet change, or bed rest, would be equally appropriate. Most doctors neglect prevention. Instead of insisting on banning tobacco, soft drinks, or heavily salted prepared meals, they again prescribe drugs. The reason is simple: as a doctor, you earn more money prescribing drugs than advocating a healthy lifestyle. In terms of the workload:income ratio, the best patients are asymptomatic and relatively healthy patients with a chronic condition (diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension) who need to renew their prescription every month for the rest of their life.

Do you see the parallel with language teachers? In any case, reject 'overteaching'.

Let us summarise:

1. Avoid bored and boring teachers.
2. Insist on an initial quick grammar overview. Grammar is not a black hole. The number of problems you need to resolve is finite.
3. Opt for the coach model and limit the number of lessons. First month: 10-20 lessons; second and third month: 4 lessons; fourth month and later: 1 to 2 lessons.
4. Make sure that your coach explains the grammar in your native language.

After leaving behind the complex topic of language teachers, you will cautiously approach your next step: producing intelligible sounds in your new language. Learning, listening, reading - hundreds of hours, thousands of words. If you followed my advice to study in silence, time has passed. Now the day has come where you want to express yourself. Speaking is fundamental to humans. Do it.

The initial verb training and the first rounds of grammar will not take more than 100 hours. Your total workload is now