Most of the adults who come to Professional have studied English before.
School, university, sometimes a course or a private tutor on top of that. The words look familiar, the rules were covered at some point, but saying anything alive just does not happen.
The school has been working with exactly these people since 2008. The approach that grew out of it is not what you would call fashionable. But it is logical, consistent and tested by eighteen years of practice.
A child picks a language up by ear. After fourteen that no longer works: intuition alone is not enough. An adult needs to understand the logic — why a sentence is built this way, which tense to choose, where the auxiliary verb goes and how one structure differs from another. So we take grammar apart in detail, with examples that make sense.
The standard objection: translation trains you to think in your native language. In reality that habit is already there. An adult beginner translates in their head anyway, just unnoticed and with no control at all. Translating sentences brings that process into the open, where a mistake is visible at once and can be corrected. It is not the goal but the tool.
Every new topic rests on the previous ones. Simple sentences first, then they grow more complex both in vocabulary and in grammar. Nothing covered disappears: grammar keeps coming back in new tasks and is repeated in new contexts until it starts working on its own. From a certain point on, even discussing grammar in the group switches to English.
A common problem for adults: you try to speak English as intricately as you speak your own language, get tangled up and go quiet. We teach you to simplify the sentence without simplifying the thought. More complex structures come later, and they come by themselves.
Retellings, home reading, film discussions, transcribing audio. Students use the language constantly instead of only taking it in.
The school never found a ready-made coursebook that gave it what it needed. So it wrote its own.
The current one is called Bottlenecks of English Grammar. Before it there was the Blue Book, then the Orange Book, then the Big Orange Book, or simply BOB. Four editions in eighteen years, and each new one appeared because the lessons themselves made it visible which exercise was not working and what was missing.
Today the coursebook holds sentence-translation exercises on core grammar from A1 to B2.
Four editions in eighteen years. Each one thicker than the last.
«Only a handful of schools write their own coursebooks: it is an enormous amount of work that never pays for itself directly. What a student opens in their first lesson is eighteen years of corrections, made with real groups.»
Grammar is the foundation, but the course is not limited to grammar lessons. In class and at home, students:
listen to audio and transcribe it at home, writing down what they hear word by word
write reproductions: first they listen to a text and work through it, then they reproduce it in writing in English
read books as part of their home reading and retell what they have read
watch films and discuss the plot, the characters and the questions the films raise
learn idioms and ready-made phrases native speakers use every day
learn to ask questions, keep a conversation going and argue their point
Grammar: explanation + sentence translation
Exercises, transcribing audio, home reading
Speaking practice, with a different teacher
A retelling, a film, Quizlet / Wordwall
Listening deserves a separate word. Simply playing a recording and checking the answers is not enough. When a student transcribes audio at home, they start hearing endings, contractions, words running together and familiar words in unfamiliar shapes. What used to be a continuous stream of sound breaks down into separate parts.
Quizlet helps revise vocabulary regularly, Wordwall reinforces grammar, and materials, homework and day-to-day organisation are gradually moving to Kalyna, a Ukrainian platform for language schools. But no platform has ever taught anyone a language on its own. Technology works only when it becomes part of the system rather than replacing it.
Cambridge English publishes guidelines for how many learning hours it takes to reach each level. These are cumulative hours from zero, not hours for a single level.
500–600 hours is roughly three and a half years of lessons twice a week
In other words, the road from zero to a confident B2 is roughly 500–600 hours of lessons. That is exactly why promises of fluent English in a month have nothing in common with how a language skill is actually formed.
The format of your studies has to survive that distance. It must be not only effective but also financially sustainable over several years.
A language takes time, regularity and effort. But that effort does not have to be chaotic. What it needs is a clear structure, constant revision, a grammar foundation, reading, listening, a growing vocabulary and plenty of practice. That is exactly what this methodology brings together.
A free online test and a conversation with a teacher: we will find your level, go through what you need it for, and tell you which group is the right place to start.