There is a huge market for English as a second language and a lot of money to be made.  Unfortunately, this fact invites a lot of businesses into the market that offer poor quality courses in all areas of English.  Competition doesn’t always bring high quality.  Often it brings good marketers and sales people.  I don’t want to mention any particular names, but some of the top English teaching schools in the world offer really terrible lessons.  Teachers aren’t paid that much money compared with other industries, so many foreign teachers are of low quality.  Also, most students buy mainly on brand image and a good “sales pitch” rather than focusing on quality.

The reason for this is simple:  Students don’t know how good a school really is.  They see advertisements, they read reviews (which are often fake) and they see what the school looks like.  Some of the more expensive schools have a nice looking brand, attractive staff, high quality computers, but a very poor program.  At first glance, everything looks great, but finally when it’s too late, the student realizes that they’ve wasted their money.

They might tell some friends about how bad their experience was, but the school can still make money by finding new students and repeating the process over and over with new advertisements and a slightly different “sales pitch”.  This makes sense from a business perspective but it leaves the world uneducated in English.  The reason I’m writing about this is that it’s important to understand how true this is and make use good judgement before buying anything.

I’ve spent years searching for the best English learning programs and I’d like to recommend the Best Online Spoken English Course I’ve seen.  It’s an amazing price and it will help your speaking and your understanding of international business.

Business English is not only a language but also a type of international culture.  It’s a kind of world culture you need to understand if you want to seriously succeed in the world of International business.

International Business English is basically the way the world communicates when doing business.  Grammar and showing off with high level vocabulary is not necessary.  The most important part of this world is understanding how to relate to people and make your point short and clear to other people.  Business English is about getting the job done and it’s not about anything else.  Understanding others and being understood is the whole key.

One interesting tip that you might not have thought of is that using a simpler version of English might actually be better than a more advanced one.  You should of course learn all the advanced stuff yourself, but don’t forget that you will be dealing a lot with other people who don’t speak English well.  Even if your English is perfect, you need to take into account the level of English that other people have.  If you write or speak at a higher level than they can understand, you are wasting your time, their time, and most importantly, losing the business deal.

International Business English is a high level yet simple form of communication.  It’s direct, polite, and to the point.

If you are serious about succeeding internationally, you should check out:

International Business English

There is an English saying that says, “In life there is no such thing as a free lunch”.  That means that even free things have some “hidden cost” in them.

If your phone company offers you a “free phone” it’s not really free.  They are making money from the services they charge and give you the phone to get more customers.  The good news is that as a consumer you can often take advantage of good free business information on PDF.

The “trade off” is that you need to provide your email so that the company can later try to sell you stuff.  If you don’t like the emails, you can always block them anyway.  Some companies are good, some aren’t.  It’s life and you need to take a chance.

If you have a good feeling about some company, you might want to consider giving your email to see what kind of offers they have.  If the website looks bad or your don’t like the writing style, you should think twice and be careful.  If you do like what is being said, then you might want to give your email in exchange for the “free” gift.  If you are learning English as a second language you will be able to find many different Ebooks on the subject.  If you are learning vocabulary or general business English, I can recommend a site that gives a great “free” gift and won’t sell your email or bother you much.

Check out this free Business English PDF

A lot of people get a bit “lazy” when sending documents.  If you want to impress someone in a business setting, go the extra mile and make a PDF of the same material.  The content won’t be any “better” but it will appear better if you send it in PDF form.  It appears that you spent more time doing the research and it makes the document appear more valuable.

There are many programs that convert regular text documents to PDF files and they are easy to find online.

This is just a psychological phenomenon that really works well in the real world.  In English, we have a saying, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”.  It means basically that we should judge the inside content instead of the pretty packaging.  The interesting thing is, however, that no matter how hard we try, we can’t help ourselves.  We judge things on appearance whether we like it or not.  I sold a lot more stuff on one website just by changing the design.  It made people take the website more seriously.  This is the same idea here.

The truth is that often better content really IS available in PDF form.  I’ve made several free ones to help people with their English speaking.  I’m going to point you to one article that I wrote and feel free to follow the links and download the free material that I’m sure you’ll find helpful.

Spoken English PDF