Has anyone tried learning/improving a language using Michel Thomas's tapes/CDs? For those that don't know of him, there are no books as such – he teaches by using explanations, drills and repetition.
A Nobel laureate's play in Hong Kong
4 hours ago
5 comments:
I had a friend who swore by using his tapes to learn Spanish. I have a set here that I listened to once when I was learning. Not my style and he had a terrible terrible accent.
I've had more success with the Assimil tapes / book if you're learning Spanish. I used them for Italian and Spanish and would recommend them for self study.
Interesting. I think it depends a bit on such things as your need to have a native speaker modelling the language, and the extent of linguistic knowledge you possess, to get the most out of his indirect and inferential approach. Of course, knowing Latin is a great help with the Romance languages.
I used his Spanish course and it worked for me, up to a reasonable standard. The format can get a little irritating, with clever student, dim student and you being the third 'virtual' student, but it does drive home the pronunciation and stresses which are important. What it doesn't give you is practice listening to native Spanish speakers, so you have to go and search that out yourself. All that said, there's a huge gulf between textbook and vernacular Spanish, as the latter makes heavy use of the subjunctive tense; only a one-on-one conversational course will teach that.
They were by far the most effective CDs I ever used (Spanish), and for some friends too. I reckon it's because he teaches you to build sentences, not vocabulary. They teach how the language is put together and make further learning much easier. So if you're the sort that likes to learn from the bottom up then they are ideal.
The subjunctive mood, with its foucs on uncertainty and unrealised or hypothetical events, could have been made for Spanish!
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