I learned French thanks to Michel Thomas' beginner and advanced series. It definitely does work. I'm now a B2 in French after 2 years in Switzerland and I'm now starting to listen to his German lessons. Everyone remarks how quickly I'm learning. So, I can't recommend strongly enough how helpful it will be to you if you really *want* to learn a language.
As a matter of fact, this approach can be utilized partly in teaching a foreign language. It's the cheapest way to practice a language. But this approach makes memory work harder, mostly hearing memory.
Thank you for uploading this. I have been looking for this for years and even contacted the producers of this to see if they would re-release it on DVD. Many thanks.
I agree but only to a small extent with you. Michel Thomas' courses are excellent for showing the connections and real-world applications of a language. I listened to his french course in full after completing 2.5 years of the language in school and I still learned things I never thought of. His approach makes learning a language interesting, easy and really enforces the TRUE basics of the language as opposed to the grammar-first or phrase-approach systems.
you hit he nail on the head "he tells them NOT TO WORRY about remembering". Worrying about remembering is certainly not going to help with remembering, may actually inhibit it. Straining to read, or hear, similarly doesn't help either activities. It just creates tension, discomfort, and leads to blockages to those very actions. Without those blockages, with that tension, the knowledge is allowed to flow freely
I learnt Italian and Spanish with Michel through his CDs: always will be in his debt and best buys I have ever made. You will not be fluent after 8 hours but he gives you a really solid grounding RIP Michel
Outstanding. The ones in his own voice - French, Spanish, German, Italian - are of course a fascinating artefacts too and, though Michel would deny it, uniquely effective.
I love this man! If I ever become a language teacher, I'll be using his method. No desks. Everyone would be sitting on comfortable seating and there would be hardly any reading or writing. Like Sambucca said, we all learnt to speak before we learnt to read or write.
I was learning italian and hired his cd from the library to improve my italian and boy does his method work, remember as a baby when you learnt your maternal language, well thats how he teaches you to just listen! and it works! Di manchester UK
Thank you so much, yoni23able! I've wanted to see this documentary since 2004 or 2005, but then the only copies I could find were in some library in England! RUclips for the win! I'm really curious about your blog, too - where can I find it? I don't see a link anywhere... Thanks again!
Michel is great. Arabic is my mother tongue, and with Michel I learned in one month Spanish while I was taking a Spanish course, in the last two weeks of the course, I could speak Spanish with the teacher, and she thought I'm a genius!!!! R.I.P Michel
" His conflict was with what he saw as a teaching industry that relied on students continually needing to be taught. He wasn't necessarily correct..." Oh yes he was correct, his success rate was 100% - the fact that the teaching industry does not achieve this means he was right.
Definitely agree with this, the other courses are great, but the ones taught by Michel himself are the best. The female student in the French course struggles somewhat but I found that reassuring when I had forgotten something.
I did many language courses both in and out of school and learned nothing. Michel Thomas is THE master, I bought many of his CD's and was speaking the language in less than three months. His genius has been underplayed for the very reasons you speak of. We have lost a star but can contribute to his legacy as much as we can so that others may begin to now educate themselves outside of the school 'institution'.
Each track on his CDs is about five minutes long - some shorter, some longer. And almost each track introduces something new, but also asks you about something he covered earlier. So you have constant progression in your learning, and constant reviewing of past topics. And with Thomas' CDs, you will learn and *know* the grammar. I took Spanish classes for years and studied Latin, so I'm familiar with grammar, but Thomas' method is the most effective I've tried.
He recommended the newspaper Liberation to me as it often presented its interviews with the interviewee quoted directly, so a great example of spoken French. If you can't get hold of it, and it's not too expensive here in the UK, they have some of it on-line. Google "liberation newspaper" and in their search box put "interview".
Hi, I've been teaching by using Michel's method for some time now. I think it would be enormously useful to all teachers if you release (for sale or whatever) the non-edited footage from the teaching sessions in the movie. The full sessions, as they unfolded for hours. Just seeing how Michel overcomes various problems that come up in the process would be extremely helpful. This could be an invaluable teaching resource. Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks.
+Borislav Zlatanov The audio language courses taught by Michel include all of the techniques he used while teaching during the making of the documentary. There is nothing more, really, in the footage we didn't use in the documentary. It might be a good experience, if you had the time and resources, to listen to his French, Spanish, German and Italian courses. That would be the complete Michel experience. Glad you found the documentary interesting. All the best - Nigel
+yoni23able I'll definitely go through those audio courses then. I've only taken the German one so far. Thank you, Nigel. I'm positive that Michel's methods and approaches will not be lost and we'll build upon them.
I think at some point when listening to the tapes, if you try to write what you hear and apply that technique every day for ten minutes' worth of audio footage, you'll end up going even further!
My violin teacher has a similar method in his violin teaching that Michel has to his language learning. He doesn't take "intensity" seriously. Instead he takes method before intensity in his teaching. I'm talking about my violin teacher and Michel so both of them produce results.
Hi, I started learning Spanish recently, and I have found it interesting & not too intimidating (so far). I wanted to take it further with Thomas's lessons. I came across several positive reviews of his lessons; however, there were also those who found his accent difficult to understand and his pace a little slow. Can somebody who has used his CDs tell me whether I have anything to worry about? I am serious about this, so I will be grateful if I could receive a serious reply. Thanks in advance!
At the end of his advanced tapes he tell the students to read interviews. Where do you find these interviews? The only thing I found that comes close is Yahoo in another language and reading the comments in the news articles.
I've looked on amazon & there is a "Practice makes perfect" series for language learning, the positive reviews I've read are monstrous so they must be pretty damn good books. May I suggest trying them out along with the MT method cos grammar building seems to be the best with those books.
I couldn't agree more. I had 5 years of french, and even got a C in my GCSE French, but couldn't order food or a train ticket, never mind hold a conversation...
We did that on his request, to make the room as relaxed as possible. There's no need for there being anything around that makes it look like a classroom. To him that would produce the expectation of learning and stress. So out with desks and hard chairs, and in with the potted plants. And as there was no blackboard or any reading or writing, no need for any of those implements either.
If you're completely open to the languages you want to learn go for the ones that Michel himself teaches - French, German, Italian, Spanish. All very good. Spanish is excellent as is French (although one of the students he teaches struggles quite a bit). When you've heard Michel teach then you'll have an understanding of the source method to which all the teachers in the other courses refer.
The New Range has 4 levels. Start, Total, Perfect & Masterclass. Is the Start level the same as the first hour of the Total level cos I don't want to make the mistake of buying the Start package & Total Package only to find the Start level is the same as the opening to the Total level.
@frox54 the point he makes is that if you understand something you don't have to remember it, whereas rote learning solely depends on repetition. So he always bases his explanations on a structure that makes sense and can be understood. Once understood you can then create the language from the rules you possess. At first this can be a struggle, but it does give you an amazing feeling of 'ownership' of your knowledge.
I think rightly or wrongly that Universities and other teaching institutions have a vested interest in making people believe that learning anything is difficult.It gives them a stranglehold over the product and the competition.
It is curious that in order to remove any interfering sources of stress, he put up screens to hide the god damn computers from view. O Michel, we will greatly miss you!
@TheFatlatvian I so agree. Michel Thomas taught me a great deal of spanish, but when I finally arrived to spain I found myself desperately in need of another lesson; how to dissect the words once their stirred into messy and slurry sentences.
The problem is that the conventional educational tradition has scared the entire western tradition away from what was obvious to the great minds of the Renaissance -that learning is an adventure and probably the greatest excitement available on the planet. So we are all suffering from a collective post-traumatic stress disorder. We have found a workaround - cane the brain - and like poor, whipped dogs, never imagine that there is another way. In an age of no furtures, let this be our challenge!
There was a comment, since removed, asking why did he want to people to learn languages and yet keep it to a small number of wealthy people? It's a good point, and from having spent time with him during the filming it was because he was obsessed about having complete control of the method. He felt he had been let down in the past when he offered it to various universities. More complicated than that, of course. And eventually he created the CD course. I will write more about this at some point.
Transcript now available at www.scribd.com/MFMSmith. It was very salutary although hard work to follow Michel's style idea by idea; and I would suggest others try and do the same. I'd be keen to exchange technical results with other interested enquirers. Especially interesting is: if you were fluent in a foreign tongue, could you use Michel's method in that tongue as the carrier for teaching English and get comparable results? Of course it's been commercialized now and there are look-alike presenters, and the Russian lady is particularly impressive... But there are more strands to this than meets the eye...
Here, I shall give you instructions of far superior method of learning any language you want: *Step.1* - Find and fall in love with a girl/boy that speaks the language you would like to learn. Everything else is history. Love will ignite burning desire to understand the other person in such magnitude that learning will become effortless. In all fairness, Michel was on a right path. He wanted to move his students to the place of love, where nothing stops them. No doubts, fears, 2nd thoughts...just racing forward in love.
Why be concerned with exams? We need a new civilization of respect, where people are valued less as units of production - ie as objects - and more as people. We should all be winners in life. That would be a humane life to live.... Michel clearly believed in it and so do I...Kindle an interest in the learning process itself...that is the answer!
Yep, you're right, you are a bigger nerd than I am. :p I will give you my little pair of spectacles and book of Grammar for Nerds. In the meantime, I will let you ponder over the error that still exists in the tenses used in your first post. ;)
Consider this: Woody Allen learned French from him, and yet you'll never find Allen in a French interview speaking French here on youtube. Why? Because "easy come, easy go". There is no shortcut to learning a language, to really know it. It takes a lifetime of study (but to be conversational requires only a year or two).
Yeah I was told I wasn't 'cut out for engineering'. Teachers tell you this when they don't know how to teach you, because it couldn't possibly be THEIR fault.
You mention one of the students struggling a bit but then we are all different in our initial capabilities. The essential thing is that Thomas got there in the end, his success rate was 100% - which proves conventional learning methods a total failure.
@JohnSmithTheSecond Well, I can make simple sentences, and not much understanding.. I stopped learning since 4 months, but I still able to generate sentences!!! I decided to learn French
I'm about 30 lessons into French now. I've learned more in the couple hours of listening to him than a whole semester of French at my university (University of Florida). Absolutely incredible.
G35Magnaflow yeah, that's great but since there are no statistical studies comparing this with other methods, it's all about impressions/opinions not facts....
Yeah I agree with you but this is the kind of subject that's hard to measure statistically since it's a teaching method. For example, no matter what the statistics are for Rosetta Stone, all I hear are bad things about it. Plus, you can find all these courses for free on pirate bay lol, so the best way is to just see for yourself.
Hi Luis. The children weren't being set up for exams. We took Michel in there to see how we could increase their ability and comfort in being able to communicate in the new language. These young people were able to communicate without fear, to construct sentences with the knowledge they had and be confident that what they were saying was completely correct. There are a couple of things learning with Michel does. Firstly, it gives you all that knowledge in a stress free way. Secondly, you understand that learning a language is about communicating with another human being. If you accurately construct your thoughts, and the mistakes that you do make don't hinder comprehension, then the person on the other side of the net will begin to communicate with you at your level. When you have made that human connection, then success at the language will naturally grow.
@yoni23able I'm Italian teaching english and french. i understand his method can be really striking if you want to learn the basic things of a language. that'more or less the way i teach sometimes. but let's be honest. in my classes i have an average of minimum 20 students,piled up in desks. , two|three hours per week .......it would be paradise if i had the chance of teaching in such a cozy atmosphere. with at last 10 people seeming in a massage therapy class rather than language class.
SO Emily's teacher said she should give up because she has no talent for languages - hope the teacher is still alive as he (or she) will be eating humble pie for ever.
Michel in fact works with unconscious memory and the true resources of the brain which God has given us. The ancients and the medievals worked hard to understood that and had 'arts' of memory. Only the arrogant moderns are out of step. There is more in heaven and earth than dreamed of in our present philosophies, as Shakespeare almost said...
@ladycarlotta0 furthermore. if you want to learn french you HAVE to study and memorize and hard work and do it for at least one year. of course it depend on the level you want to reach. but don't tell me that you can manage to read Proust by simply following some lessons without writing or reading
Rrriigghhttt, we'll make sure to ignore one of the greatest language teachers in the world in favor the opinion of an ordinary person, with most likely no experience in language training.
![Gunna - HIM ALL ALONG [Official Visualizer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HiCxoDeo0hc/mqdefault.jpg)
These are some of the most well worded, grammatically correct comments I've ever seen on youtube.
This guy is the best teacher of french ever wow
I love this men...learn so much with him..could recognise is voice in a million.
His voice is so amazing, and he was such an amazing person, Thank you Michel
The best language courses I've ever listened to.
This man made my life easier, truly genious and reformist
Ah i been listening to his voice for so long, first time i see him! rip you've done great to humanity's learning!!!
Michel Thomas is a great guy. Thanks to him, I have learned French after forgetting everything from school. Full respect to the man.
A plus.
I love the fact that the members of the class hauled the furniture up the stairs and set up the room. That made it theirs.
You were very fortunate to work with such a genius. Thanks ever so much for posting this documentary.
I learned French thanks to Michel Thomas' beginner and advanced series. It definitely does work. I'm now a B2 in French after 2 years in Switzerland and I'm now starting to listen to his German lessons. Everyone remarks how quickly I'm learning. So, I can't recommend strongly enough how helpful it will be to you if you really *want* to learn a language.
As a matter of fact, this approach can be utilized partly in teaching a foreign language. It's the cheapest way to practice a language. But this approach makes memory work harder, mostly hearing memory.
Thank you for uploading this. I have been looking for this for years and even contacted the producers of this to see if they would re-release it on DVD. Many thanks.
@peaps Same! I had no idea that this was the man behind my French learning records! This is amazing.
I agree but only to a small extent with you. Michel Thomas' courses are excellent for showing the connections and real-world applications of a language. I listened to his french course in full after completing 2.5 years of the language in school and I still learned things I never thought of. His approach makes learning a language interesting, easy and really enforces the TRUE basics of the language as opposed to the grammar-first or phrase-approach systems.
Thank you for my introduction to Spanish, Mr Thomas. An amazing course. Goes well with Margarita Madrigal's book...
His voice. Great teacher.
It's so unusual to see the man behind the voice. Riiiggghhhhttt!! What a great man.
please upload the other parts of this! i can't find it anywhere but i have been trying to find it forever!
you hit he nail on the head "he tells them NOT TO WORRY about remembering". Worrying about remembering is certainly not going to help with remembering, may actually inhibit it. Straining to read, or hear, similarly doesn't help either activities. It just creates tension, discomfort, and leads to blockages to those very actions. Without those blockages, with that tension, the knowledge is allowed to flow freely
It's extraordinary to hear a teach order his students to NOT practice or review outside the learning session. To leave it alone.
i am halfway on th emichel thomas audio and has helped me alot in spanish,es muy gracias senior thomas.es muy necessito ablo gracias.bless you
No hablas un culo
I learnt Italian and Spanish with Michel through his CDs: always will be in his debt and best buys I have ever made. You will not be fluent after 8 hours but he gives you a really solid grounding RIP Michel
Outstanding. The ones in his own voice - French, Spanish, German, Italian - are of course a fascinating artefacts too and, though Michel would deny it, uniquely effective.
I am currently learning French with Michels tapes. Really great stuff!
I love this man! If I ever become a language teacher, I'll be using his method. No desks. Everyone would be sitting on comfortable seating and there would be hardly any reading or writing. Like Sambucca said, we all learnt to speak before we learnt to read or write.
I was learning italian and hired his cd from the library to improve my italian and boy does his method work, remember as a baby when you learnt your maternal language, well thats how he teaches you to just listen! and it works! Di manchester UK
I wish michel thomas was still alive so i can personally learn spanish from him. Thanks for the audiobook. Ahora, hablo espaniol! Muchos gracias!
i love the sound of his voice.
Thank you so much, yoni23able! I've wanted to see this documentary since 2004 or 2005, but then the only copies I could find were in some library in England! RUclips for the win! I'm really curious about your blog, too - where can I find it? I don't see a link anywhere... Thanks again!
RIP Michel Thomas x
My father was taught by him in the mid-80s
He was a genius!
Michel is great. Arabic is my mother tongue, and with Michel I learned in one month Spanish while I was taking a Spanish course, in the last two weeks of the course, I could speak Spanish with the teacher, and she thought I'm a genius!!!! R.I.P Michel
" His conflict was with what he saw as a teaching industry that relied on students continually needing to be taught. He wasn't necessarily correct..."
Oh yes he was correct, his success rate was 100% - the fact that the teaching industry does not achieve this means he was right.
The man was a genius he taght me advanced Spanish via his CD and basic French gratefull to him.
Definitely agree with this, the other courses are great, but the ones taught by Michel himself are the best. The female student in the French course struggles somewhat but I found that reassuring when I had forgotten something.
I did many language courses both in and out of school and learned nothing. Michel Thomas is THE master, I bought many of his CD's and was speaking the language in less than three months. His genius has been underplayed for the very reasons you speak of. We have lost a star but can contribute to his legacy as much as we can so that others may begin to now educate themselves outside of the school 'institution'.
Each track on his CDs is about five minutes long - some shorter, some longer. And almost each track introduces something new, but also asks you about something he covered earlier. So you have constant progression in your learning, and constant reviewing of past topics.
And with Thomas' CDs, you will learn and *know* the grammar. I took Spanish classes for years and studied Latin, so I'm familiar with grammar, but Thomas' method is the most effective I've tried.
He was the best, RIP. I learn Spanish with his DVDs and if you want to learn Spanish, French or any other languages, try his DVDs and see the magic
He recommended the newspaper Liberation to me as it often presented its interviews with the interviewee quoted directly, so a great example of spoken French. If you can't get hold of it, and it's not too expensive here in the UK, they have some of it on-line. Google "liberation newspaper" and in their search box put "interview".
Hi,
I've been teaching by using Michel's method for some time now. I think it would be enormously useful to all teachers if you release (for sale or whatever) the non-edited footage from the teaching sessions in the movie. The full sessions, as they unfolded for hours. Just seeing how Michel overcomes various problems that come up in the process would be extremely helpful. This could be an invaluable teaching resource.
Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks.
+Borislav Zlatanov The audio language courses taught by Michel include all of the techniques he used while teaching during the making of the documentary. There is nothing more, really, in the footage we didn't use in the documentary. It might be a good experience, if you had the time and resources, to listen to his French, Spanish, German and Italian courses. That would be the complete Michel experience. Glad you found the documentary interesting. All the best - Nigel
+yoni23able I'll definitely go through those audio courses then. I've only taken the German one so far. Thank you, Nigel. I'm positive that Michel's methods and approaches will not be lost and we'll build upon them.
I really love his voice. (J'aime vraiment sa voix)
I recommend this a lot it's so good!!!!!!
I think that his method coupled with pimsleur will give a solid learning course to anyone
I think at some point when listening to the tapes, if you try to write what you hear and apply that technique every day for ten minutes' worth of audio footage, you'll end up going even further!
Thank you so much for the upload, is there any chance you could upload part 2 and 3 as well?
My violin teacher has a similar method in his violin teaching that Michel has to his language learning. He doesn't take "intensity" seriously. Instead he takes method before intensity in his teaching. I'm talking about my violin teacher and Michel so both of them produce results.
Hi, I started learning Spanish recently, and I have found it interesting & not too intimidating (so far). I wanted to take it further with Thomas's lessons. I came across several positive reviews of his lessons; however, there were also those who found his accent difficult to understand and his pace a little slow. Can somebody who has used his CDs tell me whether I have anything to worry about? I am serious about this, so I will be grateful if I could receive a serious reply. Thanks in advance!
aaah... the man in person :) good to see the motion behind that familiar voice!
Thank you for this
Why are there 8 dislikes?? Michele Thomas is amazing! I learned Spanish in 3 weeks!
I now speak spanish with a proud forceful polish accent, and people love it!
At the end of his advanced tapes he tell the students to read interviews. Where do you find these interviews? The only thing I found that comes close is Yahoo in another language and reading the comments in the news articles.
I've looked on amazon & there is a "Practice makes perfect" series for language learning, the positive reviews I've read are monstrous so they must be pretty damn good books. May I suggest trying them out along with the MT method cos grammar building seems to be the best with those books.
"I will DISSECT, everything, yes? into small parts..."
Whilst doing one of his courses, his mannerisms start becoming really addictive.
wow, I wish I got to meet Michel, what an Amazing Teacher. I owe him so so much. AMAZING MAN !!!! GREATEST TEACHER IN THE WORLD WITHOUT QUESTION !!!
Great! I'd love to see a clip of him speaking French. Hopefully something will surface on RUclips eventually. Thanks FluentCzech!
I couldn't agree more. I had 5 years of french, and even got a C in my GCSE French, but couldn't order food or a train ticket, never mind hold a conversation...
My god, what are we doing with our kids? This is the exact opposite of all learning in the school system. Just so pleasant for the student.
We did that on his request, to make the room as relaxed as possible. There's no need for there being anything around that makes it look like a classroom. To him that would produce the expectation of learning and stress. So out with desks and hard chairs, and in with the potted plants. And as there was no blackboard or any reading or writing, no need for any of those implements either.
If you're completely open to the languages you want to learn go for the ones that Michel himself teaches - French, German, Italian, Spanish. All very good. Spanish is excellent as is French (although one of the students he teaches struggles quite a bit). When you've heard Michel teach then you'll have an understanding of the source method to which all the teachers in the other courses refer.
Is the masterclass level in the new range the exact same as the Language Builder from the old range.
Would be cool to see where these kids are now
man ..you are the best :D
odličan jeeee...gledala sam ga :)
The New Range has 4 levels. Start, Total, Perfect & Masterclass. Is the Start level the same as the first hour of the Total level cos I don't want to make the mistake of buying the Start package & Total Package only to find the Start level is the same as the opening to the Total level.
Agree with Yoni...the Spanish one is great. Best audio course by a country mile. I still use the Advanced one now...
What do you think, does he have a strong accent when he speaks French? Is that a bad thing for a language learner?
@frox54 the point he makes is that if you understand something you don't have to remember it, whereas rote learning solely depends on repetition. So he always bases his explanations on a structure that makes sense and can be understood. Once understood you can then create the language from the rules you possess. At first this can be a struggle, but it does give you an amazing feeling of 'ownership' of your knowledge.
Love it!!!!
It's nice to know that it is the educators that are wrong.
I think rightly or wrongly that Universities and other teaching institutions have a vested interest in making people believe that learning anything is difficult.It gives them a stranglehold over the product and the competition.
It is curious that in order to remove any interfering sources of stress, he put up screens to hide the god damn computers from view. O Michel, we will greatly miss you!
Actually, I have seen several shows on TV in France where Woody Allen was interviewed in French.
@TheFatlatvian I so agree. Michel Thomas taught me a great deal of spanish, but when I finally arrived to spain I found myself desperately in need of another lesson; how to dissect the words once their stirred into messy and slurry sentences.
The problem is that the conventional educational tradition has scared the entire western tradition away from what was obvious to the great minds of the Renaissance -that learning is an adventure and probably the greatest excitement available on the planet. So we are all suffering from a collective post-traumatic stress disorder. We have found a workaround - cane the brain - and like poor, whipped dogs, never imagine that there is another way. In an age of no furtures, let this be our challenge!
My thoughts exactly
There was a comment, since removed, asking why did he want to people to learn languages and yet keep it to a small number of wealthy people? It's a good point, and from having spent time with him during the filming it was because he was obsessed about having complete control of the method. He felt he had been let down in the past when he offered it to various universities. More complicated than that, of course. And eventually he created the CD course. I will write more about this at some point.
I found it. Thanks.
Transcript now available at www.scribd.com/MFMSmith. It was very salutary although hard work to follow Michel's style idea by idea; and I would suggest others try and do the same. I'd be keen to exchange technical results with other interested enquirers. Especially interesting is: if you were fluent in a foreign tongue, could you use Michel's method in that tongue as the carrier for teaching English and get comparable results? Of course it's been commercialized now and there are look-alike presenters, and the Russian lady is particularly impressive... But there are more strands to this than meets the eye...
Master of language
Here, I shall give you instructions of far superior method of learning any language you want:
*Step.1* - Find and fall in love with a girl/boy that speaks the language you would like to learn.
Everything else is history. Love will ignite burning desire to understand the other person in such magnitude that learning will become effortless.
In all fairness, Michel was on a right path. He wanted to move his students to the place of love, where nothing stops them. No doubts, fears, 2nd thoughts...just racing forward in love.
Why be concerned with exams? We need a new civilization of respect, where people are valued less as units of production - ie as objects - and more as people. We should all be winners in life. That would be a humane life to live.... Michel clearly believed in it and so do I...Kindle an interest in the learning process itself...that is the answer!
Why would he deny it was effective?
Yep, you're right, you are a bigger nerd than I am. :p
I will give you my little pair of spectacles and book of Grammar for Nerds.
In the meantime, I will let you ponder over the error that still exists in the tenses used in your first post. ;)
Hah... I was just about to write the opposite. Then again, as you were obviously being ironic, that wouldn't really be "opposite", would it?
Consider this: Woody Allen learned French from him, and yet you'll never find Allen in a French interview speaking French here on youtube. Why? Because "easy come, easy go". There is no shortcut to learning a language, to really know it. It takes a lifetime of study (but to be conversational requires only a year or two).
Yeah I was told I wasn't 'cut out for engineering'. Teachers tell you this when they don't know how to teach you, because it couldn't possibly be THEIR fault.
You mention one of the students struggling a bit but then we are all different in our initial capabilities. The essential thing is that Thomas got there in the end, his success rate was 100% - which proves conventional learning methods a total failure.
Michel Thomas for Maths, Naked Numbers by Paul Carson
Part 2 is now in sync. Part 3, in sync, up very soon.
@JohnSmithTheSecond Well, I can make simple sentences, and not much understanding.. I stopped learning since 4 months, but I still able to generate sentences!!! I decided to learn French
I have some doubts about this method, were these students successful with their exams?
I'm about 30 lessons into French now. I've learned more in the couple hours of listening to him than a whole semester of French at my university (University of Florida). Absolutely incredible.
G35Magnaflow yeah, that's great but since there are no statistical studies comparing this with other methods, it's all about impressions/opinions not facts....
Yeah I agree with you but this is the kind of subject that's hard to measure statistically since it's a teaching method. For example, no matter what the statistics are for Rosetta Stone, all I hear are bad things about it. Plus, you can find all these courses for free on pirate bay lol, so the best way is to just see for yourself.
Hi Luis. The children weren't being set up for exams. We took Michel in there to see how we could increase their ability and comfort in being able to communicate in the new language. These young people were able to communicate without fear, to construct sentences with the knowledge they had and be confident that what they were saying was completely correct. There are a couple of things learning with Michel does. Firstly, it gives you all that knowledge in a stress free way. Secondly, you understand that learning a language is about communicating with another human being. If you accurately construct your thoughts, and the mistakes that you do make don't hinder comprehension, then the person on the other side of the net will begin to communicate with you at your level. When you have made that human connection, then success at the language will naturally grow.
yoni23able The only "exam" that counts is their ability to communicate effectively with native speakers.
@yoni23able I'm Italian teaching english and french. i understand his method can be really striking if you want to learn the basic things of a language. that'more or less the way i teach sometimes. but let's be honest. in my classes i have an average of minimum 20 students,piled up in desks.
, two|three hours per week .......it would be paradise if i had the chance of teaching in such a cozy atmosphere. with at last 10 people seeming in a massage therapy class rather than language class.
SO Emily's teacher said she should give up because she has no talent for languages - hope the teacher is still alive as he (or she) will be eating humble pie for ever.
No, it's Rosetta Stone.
Stop arguing about it, his way works.
Michel in fact works with unconscious memory and the true resources of the brain which God has given us. The ancients and the medievals worked hard to understood that and had 'arts' of memory. Only the arrogant moderns are out of step. There is more in heaven and earth than dreamed of in our present philosophies, as Shakespeare almost said...
@ladycarlotta0 furthermore. if you want to learn french you HAVE to study and memorize and hard work and do it for at least one year. of course it depend on the level you want to reach. but don't tell me that you can manage to read Proust by simply following some lessons without writing or reading
@MrStrangler999 Awesome. Very very helpful and easy.
'''It was a very nominal fee''...I guess that;s all that matters:D
Rrriigghhttt, we'll make sure to ignore one of the greatest language teachers in the world in favor the opinion of an ordinary person, with most likely no experience in language training.