Who am I?      

    A failing student who became successful, that's who.

When I started my first foreign language studies in the eighth grade, I was a failing student.  But being on a college preparatory track, I had to get at least a "C".  Eighteen  lessons behind which I had to make up was definitely not the way to go. 

By a strange coincidence, my Spanish teacher at John Marshall High School had also been the Spanish teacher of my mother at Venice High.  Did this have anything to do with my squeaking through this class with a "C-"?  Perhaps, I don't know.  But I do know that we enjoyed no grade leniency for being a failing language student.

The following semester marked the turning point in my language studies for I had a teacher, Miss Arbour by name, who was very strict and made us do certain things that were linguistically sound.  In those days we did not have the luxury of tape recorders or computer programs,  and it was also the time when people studied foreign languages with the purpose of coming to a better understanding of their own.  Emphasis was placed upon grammar with Latin being a preferred subject, and translation form the foreign language into our own was the common system in vogue, at least in the United States before World War Two.  Mohammed had to go to the mountain.  Modern technology now brings the mountain to Mohammed.

Under the tutelage of Miss Arbour, my failing grade rose to a "B".  Armed with a new insight garnered from this experience with her, I decided to add a second foreign language, French, to my studies .   From this time onward up to and including graduate work at several universities, I am not boasting when I say that my grades in foreign language courses never once dropped below an "A-" with the exception of one six week summer course for which I got a B.  But the circumstances were special, and it was only my long years of experience  in learning foreign languages that brought me through a course for which I had no preparation and which, for most students, would have been a Waterloo.  But that is another story.

I never intended to become a teacher or to create a language program, but my friends who were taking foreign languages at the university needed my help. I knew how to approach the study of a foreign language, which, by the way, is quite different from learning any other skill, and wanted to communicate that realization to my friends.

I based my tutelage of my friends upon that which I had learned from Miss Arbour and with the simplest kind of  practice,  saw my friends also change from students having great difficulty to successful language enthusiasts such as myself.  My success and their success continually reinforces the realization I came to regarding language acquisition back in high school.   My wife, Maria, who successfully completed her Ph.D. candidacy in French Literature has her own story to tell.  But that is for another time.

It was this experience with my friends, their failure and success, as well as my own early failure and subsequent success, that ultimately brought me to the creation of the Quintessential Language Learning System ^SM. 

 If you follow the simple steps as presented by the program, you, too, will be very successful.  

          Tom Curtis