It has been estimated that there are more than a hundred million people in the world learning a foreign language.

There are literally thousands of schools helping these people get started.

A percentage, probably quite a small percentage, of this horde go on to have occupations quite outside the learning industry. They fly aeroplanes, become business executives, embassy staff, news reporters, military officers, have jobs in the tourist industries, go to sea as merchant navy officers, or organise international conferences.

Whatever it is they do, their main job is not learning languages but doing something constructive like running a chemical plant or designing buildings. A few times a year they go outside their own country and have to bring their language skills into use.

It is clear that there is a difficulty in keeping up with a language that one does not speak every day.To some extent television, radio and film can fill the gap but there is still a problem.

A woman asked me how I remembered all the word ending changes that speaking Russian involved. She said that Russian text books looked like a particularly nasty form of algebra to her. I told her that in the end it came down to rhythm - if you got it wrong it sounded wrong. After all, nine year old kids kicking a football around in Moscow have probably never heard of "orthographic changes"

What you need, if you are only using a foreign language for part of your working life, is a little reminder every few days or for fifteen minutes every day, or whatever. This is what small pieces is about. A mental elbow jogger.

It seems that the preferred delivery method is to deliver to a schedule : A script is supplied to the customer once a month. It contains ten shortish paragraphs (= Small Pieces) for translation or for reading aloud or whatever.

(Originally we had thought : "A month = 30 paragraphs !" - but experience has shown that this is far too much. Businessmen don't allot their time like students do - they have to slot stuff into busy timetables as and when.)

You can buy in bulk if you want to; that is, just order up how many scripts you want.

An example of a script can be seen here

To see Purchasing Options follow the link