VOICEbooks are NOT an online language course. In fact we prefer VOICEbook users to do an English course with a real-life qualified teacher who smiles (well, sometimes, anyway) and laughs and encourages you, who understands that you’re feeling bad if your favourite football team has just been beaten 6-0, or if you have just broken up with your boyfriend/girlfriend, or will make things easier if the weather outside is too hot for more grammar exercises, etc. The best teachers can explain things in 20 different ways, choosing the right explanation for you on that day

We like teachers, and teachers like VOICEbooks (click here to see an example).Language teachers are some of our biggest fans, because VOICEbooks enable them and their language learners to do things which they couldn’t possibly do in any other way.

To give an example: if a teacher uses a tape recorder with a class of 10 people, and asks each person to write down what they heard, there will often be ten different interpretations of a sentence! Each person will understand something different, which is a nightmare for a teacher. (This is especially true if the teacher introduces the recording without giving the students any information before the listening exercise.) It is of course impossible for a teacher to imagine all ten possible interpretations of the recording and so very often what is called "listening comprehension" is in fact not an exercise for improving language listening skills at all, but is reduced to being a mere test of the students’ listening skills (and is often only a test of their intelligence and intuition, and not a language test at all).

VOICEbooks are exercises which help language learners to make great improvements very fast, so that teachers can start to introduce interesting language materials very quickly.

• VOICEbooks are not courses. There is no beginning and no end of VOICEbooks (but there are different levels of difficulty). Listening is a fundamental human activity, and we can never say that we want to stop listening (unfortunately many people do stop listening to other people, but that is another story) and there are not many people whose listening in a foreign language is so good that they always understand all of the details in the films they watch.

If you really can’t do a course with a teacher, there are also some online courses now available where you can talk to teacher live from your desktop.

• There are several listening programs available on the net but we haven’t found any yet which do much more than ask you to answer yes or no or choose the right answer from a multiple-choice exercise. The problem is that you can often answer the questions before you listen, and anyway they are boring tests. VOICEbooks are interesting interactive exercises that help you improve your listening abilities – they are NOT tests (though they can be used as tests if needed)