Dr Rose Lee has taught Spanish and Portuguese at Michigan State University before moving to New York City and into the private sector where she produced foreign language videos for TV and educational publishers. As a result of her interest in Michel Thomas's innovative method and amazing results, she studied German with him in 1982. This was the beginning of a long and exciting collaboration, developing his programme and teaching his 'Second Phase' Spanish students.
Michel Thomas Method
Thomas's clients included diplomats, industrialists, and celebrities.[6] The success of the school led to tours and a second school in New York City, as well as a series of instructional books and tapes in French, Spanish, German, and Italian.[9] At the time of his death in 2005, Thomas's tapes, CDs, and books were the leading method of recorded language-learning in the United Kingdom.[10]
The method presents the target language by interleaving new with old material, teaching generalization from language principles, contextual diversity, and learning self-correction in an environment that attempts to be stress-free, as the teacher is responsible for learning, not the student.[18]
Thomas felt his method would "change the world"; he only started with languages as he felt that it was the most alien thing a person could learn. Solity claims the method "has huge implications for teaching anybody anything".[19]
Whereas some other courses may have you memorize grammar points, verbs, and conjugations, this method breaks down the language into building blocks which you then learn how to use without even realizing it.
Consensus on effective methods changes dramatically over time, and approaches that were extremely popular decades ago (like that of Michel Thomas) may have been rendered obsolete by contemporary research.
First, it enables you to reproduce what you learn by having you practice immediately. I think this is extremely rare in language teaching, yet this is one of the most effective ways to get you to remember and use the structures you learn. This makes the difference between active and passive learning, and it is crucial! For example, I recently found a good Slovak course on the Internet (slovake.eu) - it has lots of video, exercises, etc. Having read through big chunks of it, I am able to passively understand quite a few Slovak words. Yet I couldn't produce a Slovak sentence, even if it's as simple as 'I would like to learn this language' because the course doesn't encourage reproduction in ways that work for me. Sure, it has lots of exercises, which could perhaps achieve the same as Michel Thomas method does - but that doesn't quite work for the busy types out there, who are interested in learning, but are not so interested in solving countless drills by trying to fit the correct form with the correct ending somewhere in a web input field, multiplied a thousand times.
Second, Michel Thomas method does not shy away from grammar - rather, it embraces grammar the way that works for most people: breaking it down into manageable chunks and reinforcing with examples. If you complete a Michel Thomas course, you will have a good understanding of how the grammar of the language you're learning works - that is a great asset. And the rest is... just vocabulary. As a side note, it's true that the courses don't reveal the full grammar, but that's just a criticism about the length of the courses rather than their quality.
I think this is also where your criticism doesn't quite work. Sure, big parts of the courses are in English, and lots of it is not pronounced in a native accent - but the point of the course is not to teach you vocabulary, nor is it to give you a perfect pronunciation - rather it is to get you to practice the language, and also to help you build the basis of a language, to which you can later add more vocabulary and more advanced structures. And I think the method does that really well.
Plus I can't really agree with your comments about the fact the courses are seeking to be stress-free somehow being a disadvantage. Surely, if you prefer to stress yourself out as you think that this might increase your performance (or for whatever other reason), you can always find ways to do that? But given the world we live in today, where the reason that most people don't succeed in languages has lots to do with the fact they are being presented those languages in ineffective ways under unnecessarily stressful classroom environments, one would think that a method striving to make learning as stress-free and as fun as possible would be welcome, wouldn't one?
It feels like you've simply reviewed this course against a checklist of current best practices in language learning, many of which are not really relevant for this method or course. But did you actually use the course to learn Arabic and assess it on its effectiveness? I believe you already speak Arabic, so I'm guessing that's not the case. I think if you picked up this course without speaking any Arabic - a very intimidating language to learn - you would have left a very different review. Let me make my point...
The use of English is part of Michel Thomas' method as it relies on cognates and relating the new language back to English. Of course nowadays we try to use the target language as much as possible when teaching. But in the self-study scenario where there is no teacher, this is quite reassuring. Second, Michel Thomas courses don't attempt or claim to teach comprehension. There are other courses for that. Just like there are courses for reading, or writing. So, this is an unfair criticism. It's like judging a tennis player on how well she is at volleyball, or a romance novelist on crime fiction.
Hi Donogan, longtime reader but first-time poster here. I was wondering if you have listened through any of the Language Transfer courses yet. The method, as far as I can tell, is very similar to MT but mostly it's superior because it's free. There's an Intro Arabic course. I've heard wonderful things about the Spanish course, and I myself got a lot out of the Intro Turkish course.
I'm a French teacher and I just met a student who swore only by this method, and had been learning for almost a year, only she could not even answer my most basic questions (What is your name, Where are you from?) I had never heard of this method before but now that I've met this student and listened to the samples on the website, I can say it is a disgrace to language learning. Also, the website is so focused on blaming the teacher, like you said, saying that if you tried to learn before it was because the method was wrong, that I felt my student was pressuring me to adapt my lesson to her "learning" style. Well, needless to say, she will have some surprises when she gets to France and starts "speaking"!
Hello, I've studied Spanish using MT method, I just downloaded the .mp3's and for just around 2 days, I think I could speak decent dialogue with spanish people (not serious talks). I think what I can say is that it really depends on how you comprehend something and as what MT said: "Never ever try to memories words." This reflects on how we learn our own language. We don't memorize, we just listen and understand, and for a course of time you suddenly exercise your tongue into speaking it nicely.
The MT 'method' is not a patch on the Pimsleur 'listen-and-repeat' (and learn words and phrases in reverse) approach, which is professional, businesslike, does not allow for mistakes, and for me, is instantly engaging; not to forget the inclusion of very useful cultural notes in some of the courses, and of course, the NATIVE language speakers.
Hey! I believe MT is the best method out there in that it teaches a lot considering the short amount of study time. I don't know any method that can teach as much as MT does in such a limited time. However, the course itself is not the best. It is too short which renders it uselless unless you continue your studies with other materials. Bottom line, I believe it's the fastest and the most effective way of learning a new language; however, it's just too short and fails to cover the basics of a language.
After being entreated to "lorn ze stracture av ze langvijj", I couldn't help thinking that perhaps he ought to have spent a few minutes learning correct pronunciation as well, certainly of the English Language at any rate; I found that I had to listen very carefully to catch what he was actually saying. Whilst I realise close attention is beneficial to the learning experience, I don't feel that should extend to trying to understand the instruction given in my own language, and it certainly doesn't conform to his professed teaching methodology. For me, he fails as a language teacher on an epic scale.
I'm a huge fan of the MT method. I had been trying to learn German for 20 years when I used the MT cds. It was my a-ha moment. I have completed the first German program and can read pretty well and can get by conversationally. I also used the Spanish course and got most of the way through that one. I can read a lot, but have trouble with conversation. I have a great base though. I used the mandarin program for about an hour before going to China and just with the few words and understanding I knew I was able to get us out of a sticky situation with a cab driver while we were travelling.I recommend MT to anyone that I hear talking about learning language.
I used the earlier versions of the Arabic. I thought it was good. I noticed straight away that Jane Wightwick's pronunciation was weird (but her English pronunciation is quite weird too - she says 'tomaaarrroe' for 'tomorrow' for example. I had taken classes before moving to Cairo and the MT really helped me put sentences together when speaking. A friend who had lived in Egypt for a while but basically used the point and say a noun method of communication found it incredibly helpful to learn to construct sentences. She played it to an Egyptian friend who said there was nothing wrong with Jane Wightwick's accent! (She has been involved in a lot of learning arabic courses not just MT and not just Egyptian). Anyway, thank goodness Mahmoud was there.Other friends also found it useful for learning to create sentences.(I also learned to read arabic script and so forth, obviously not from MT, but a lot of foreigners really don't want to learn the arabic script, just speaking, as I found out). 2ff7e9595c
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