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Michel Thomas | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| hobbitofny Senior Member United States Joined 6237 days ago 280 posts - 408 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 161 of 185 08 October 2010 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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MT developed his teaching method in the context of his time. For example you can get helpful understand by study of Margarita Madrigal method and courses. Look at Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish: A Creative and Proven Approach or the version for French and German. You can see a relationship, just reading the introduction to the book. Visit Amazon and look inside the book and read the introduction. http://www.amazon.com/Madrigals-Magic-Key-Spanish-Creative/
He drew ideas from her work. If you look at what he used from her work in the three languages, you will get some helpful clues to his thinking. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elagabalus Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5198 days ago 12 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, PortugueseC1 Studies: Mandarin, German, Russian, French | Message 162 of 185 09 October 2010 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | ||
Wow, great tip! I am looking at it now. I had just assumed he developed his method at the Sorbonne where, if memory serves according to Solity's book, he had studied psychology. He would have been immersed in structuralism at the time. But - yikes - maybe he was just biting off of Madrigal? Wonder what else is known about his influences and sources for the method? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Milano1985 Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5166 days ago 9 posts - 10 votes Speaks: Sinhalese*, English, Italian Studies: French | Message 163 of 185 09 October 2010 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is brilliant and if you want to learn a language you are on the right track. I started using Michel Thomas method in May and now I can express myself in French. My advice to you is don't look for anything else and this is the ONE. You will never ever be disappointed. He was a Master of languages. I regret that I came to know about him just a few months ago.
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| Elagabalus Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5198 days ago 12 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, PortugueseC1 Studies: Mandarin, German, Russian, French | Message 164 of 185 10 October 2010 at 2:33am | IP Logged | ||
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I am getting tired so at risk of incoherence let me share another thought I just had, especially in light of the Madrigal link, which was: what would a MT course look like according to my (mis)conception of it? As an entirely systematized and mostly structure-led approach.
In my idealized - dare I say neo-Thomasian - version, there seemed to be an inverse-square law in effect. Every "run through" of the basic patterns of the target language would happen at the inverse square of the sequence that came before it. So, if tense was at the top of the grammatical hierarchy and clause structure before it, then the latter would be sequenced to be practiced in its entirety half as many times as the former. Proportionally, the introduction sequence, half that time. But, I don't mean this in such a linear way. For each run through of the, let's say, basic sentence patterns with a new target, you'd then switch tenses at a higher level and run through them again when revising. By the, let's say, third run through of the sentence patterns, you'd switch tenses again, but you'd also switch from nominitive clauses to relative and so. So, what you would have is a hierarchy of structures being recalled and actively practiced by the learner each time a new functional word or target was introduced. There would be no need for a syllabus laid out in advance, but rather just knowing the sequences (sentence patterns mostly) at each level of the hierarchy as well as the amount of times one would need to run through them to get them to stick. In other words, the Madrigal goals may be the professed targets (cognates etc) but the actual learning is taking place by constantly reinforcing the overall syntax at each level of the hierarchy: level 0 might be the basic variations of word order, level 1 clause structure with variations in coordination and subordination, level 2 tenses, and so on systematically through the language. One reason this might make sense, besides avoiding working out a detailed syllabus in advance, is that it could be adapted on the spot to the learner because you'd always know where you were going and where you had been, and you could adapt it for the behavior of a particular verb being introduced (e.g. transitive vs. intransitive). Besides that, there must have been a trick to getting people to subliminally absorb the structure of the language, and other than practice hours, I cannot see a way. Without people being conscious of it, they'd be getting the practice they needed in addition to the exposure. I sometimes thought the whole relaxation thing in MT was a red herring (at least in my mis-conception) for this underlying framework to hyper-expose learners to structure. Anyway, that's my misconception of how MT worked, but I wonder what that misconception itself would actually look like if played out. Edited by Elagabalus on 10 October 2010 at 3:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6015 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 165 of 185 10 October 2010 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
If I understand you correctly, I think you're taking things in the wrong direction. Part of the success of Thomas's teaching is the unpredictability of the teaching order. Predictability leads to automaticity. This sounds like a good thing, but it's not, because it's automaticity of completing the task, not automaticity in language. If you listen and think about it, one of the most interesting things about MT is how the students on the CD take so long even to produce some of the most simple phrases. In fact, it seems like "easy" and "hard" sentences are just as difficult for them. I say that this is because they have to go through the whole process of producing the sentence each time (although there is some heavy repetition of a feature immediately after it has been produced). If you systemise the teaching too heavily, you introduce predictability and the student can build a rule for following the teaching which in the immediate term will provide "better" responses, but the long term result is poorer because they aren't learning the underlying grammar of the language. As far as I'm concerned, this is the only rational explanation for the incredible difference in speed of learning between MT and even its most effective rivals. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Rivenburg55 Newbie United States Joined 5154 days ago 2 posts - 10 votes | Message 166 of 185 22 October 2010 at 1:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I find it fascinating that some of you on here have begun to put together some pieces
of a puzzle that I have been looking at for a long time but which no-one here seems to have yet put together in its entirety, at least not publicly. People often talk about Michel Thomas’s teaching as though it were some sort of departure from everything that went before it, a shining beacon of originality. This is in no way surprising, since Thomas did his utmost to promote such an idea during his lifetime. However, I have come to realize that this is not actually the case. Two of you put your fingers on crucial parts of this puzzle: the work of Frederick Bodmer and of Margarita Madrigal. What I have come to realize is that Michel Thomas’s courses were not original works – not at all, in fact. This can be seen very clearly if you read Bodmer’s Loom of Language alongside Margarita Madrigal’s course books. In doing so, you effectively find that you have Michel Thomas’s courses in full. Understand though that I am not merely suggesting that there are aspects similar between the two but that vast swathes of Thomas’s courses are more or less lifted directly from these two sources. It is curious to note, in support of what I am saying, that the timing of the publication of both Bodmer’s and Madrigal’s work makes this inconvenient truth a somewhat unsurprising one. Michel Thomas arrived in the United States in 1947, just 3 years after the completion of Bodmer’s Loom of Language, at a time when the book was still to be found readily available in bookstores up and down the country. At this time another author whose works were prominently displayed in bookstores was Margarita Madrigal. She was a bestseller in fact. Indeed, anyone with an interest in languages in the late 1940s would have found these courses side by side in any American bookstore. Michel Thomas arrived, of course, as a multi-lingual immigrant, whose most marketable skill was his ability in languages. Undoubtedly, having made the decision to try his hand at teaching – after all, how else was he going to make a living? – he wandered into a bookstore to see what materials were available. I think it was a sign of his intelligence – which I would never denigrate – that he saw the great potential that existed in these two ways of looking at languages. The content of his courses came from both. The overview and way of looking at European languages, he took from Bodmer – sometimes verbatim – the method for teaching a language, breaking it down into individual parts to be reassembled, he took from Margarita Madrigal. In reference to the latter, it is also worth mentioning that Madrigal offered public courses in various languages in New York for many years, a city in which Thomas also spent much of his life. If you are lucky enough to meet one of Madrigal’s former students – they all speak extremely highly of her – play them an extract of one of Thomas’s courses. They’ll all say the same thing. “Wow, he teaches just how Madrigal did.” We now only have her written courses for posterity but her live technique for teaching included periods when she would lead orally direct them through the construction of ever more complex sentences, building them up, step by step. Sound like anyone we know? It would have taken very little effort for Thomas to have attended one of these courses, to get an idea how she did it. Taking a look at the Loom of Language now, as it lies here on my desk, I can put it together with one of Madrigal’s books and find more or less the entire content of any of his courses. Even quite obscure explanations are carried over. One of my favorites is the way in which two of the tenses is Spanish are differentiated as “either a line or a dot in the past”, another is how a difficult to pronounce vowel is described as “whistling an ‘E’”, another is the number of words given that are required in order to speak a language competently. The identical stream of facts, explanations and guidance that parallel one another exactly go on and on and on. Of course, this does not mean that Thomas’s courses are not useful or effective but, as someone here has just mentioned, the only thing Thomas came up with himself was the idea of using two live students on a recording. That’s his patent. That’s his contribution. So, I think that when people are talking about Michel Thomas’s Method, they should be aware that this is what they are really talking about. The actual style of teaching, the approach he uses - even the teaching philosophy – are not his creation. Edited by Rivenburg55 on 22 October 2010 at 1:02am 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7148 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 167 of 185 22 October 2010 at 3:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I couldn't help but make the connection between Rivenburg55, whose profile cites him as a writer, with the controversy and lawsuit a few years ago between Michel Thomas and Los Angeles Times writer Roy Rivenburg, who had questioned Thomas's own accounts of his purported exploits in World War II. I'm guessing that this may be the same individual(?)
http://royrivenburg.com/ has a section on Michel Thomas entitled "Doubting Thomas" with a notation "new version coming soon", and a link to an earlier article by Rivenburg for those with an interest in the holes in Thomas's own account of his wartime derring-do, while the Michel Thomas website has a great volume of furious counterpoint providing HIS side of the story: http://www.michelthomas.org/defamatory.asp?sublev=defamatory To tell the truth, I don't know how much interest most readers of this forum will have in the non-linguistic aspects of Thomas's life, but for those with curiosity, the two links here should provide at least an initial take on both sides of the dispute. But beyond this connection, my interest was piqued by the references above to Margarita Madrigal and her teaching. Her "Magic Key to Spanish" (illustrated by a young Andy Warhol) is still in print, and gets rave reviews from readers on Amazon, and her "Magic Key to French", out of print, for some reason sells for outrageously high prices on the used book market. (There's also a "Magic Key to German", likewise out of print.) The references above to contacts with her former students drew my attention; she doesn't seem to be much known or talked about either in this forum or elsewhere on the internet, it seems, and I've often wondered about her. Accordingly, if any additional information is available on her, her philosophy of teaching languages, etc., I think that members of the forum would be very interested in reading it; I certainly would. (It may be that Rivenburg55 is planning to publish this aspect formally, in which case we'll presumably just have to wait for it, but I wanted to register my interest in any information on her, totally aside from any controversies over Michel Thomas, either in terms of the man or his method, just in case it might possibly draw out some more information on her.) 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hobbitofny Senior Member United States Joined 6237 days ago 280 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 168 of 185 22 October 2010 at 3:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Based on seeing him as work in the British TV documentary. You should also credit his ability to read the student and make needed adjustments for that student. He had clear reasons for calling on the student he did and when. It was not just chance.
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