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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6088 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes  5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 65 of 185 15 July 2008 at 11:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I skimmed over the Russian course...not nearly as impressive as the Italian course. It progresses much more slowly (though that may be due to how difficult Russian is), and one of the students is truly painful to listen to. (The teacher is the only native speaker, unless these students are faking incompetence) Pronunciation in Russian is so much more difficult for an anglophone than Italian pronunciation...I really don't think they should expose learners to anything less than a native speaker.
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| TheElvenLord Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6081 days ago 915 posts - 927 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Cornish, English* Studies: Spanish, French, German Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 66 of 185 15 July 2008 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In Russian, Natasha (The teacher) is a fluent English speaker, but is Russian. So, her pronounciation IS native.
It is much slower, but as you mentioned, I think it is because of the difficulty. For example, each word has to be given in Russian, one at a time, but with the originals, MT gave you a base of over 1000 words INSTANTLY, with the rules to make English, French/Spanish/Italian/German. So, he had a large base to work from. TEL 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| boon Diglot Groupie Ireland Joined 6160 days ago 91 posts - 177 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Mandarin, Latin | Message 67 of 185 16 July 2008 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I got the complete Michel Thomas French course on eBay. It was pretty cheap. I'm on the fourth CD at the moment. It's very good so far.
I did French is school years ago. I learned a lot about campsites. Not much else though. I concentrate most of my language-learning on Spanish. I'm on Unit 36 of FSI Basic (good but the pace is a bit slow) and I use the Hugo Spanish in 3 Months course (good for revision and reference, bad for beginners). I got the Teach Yourself Improve Your Spanish as well, but the conversations bored me to tears. And there's way too much spoken English on the recordings. I wouldn't recommend it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| !LH@N Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6822 days ago 487 posts - 531 votes Speaks: German, Turkish*, English Studies: Serbo-Croatian, Spanish | Message 68 of 185 17 July 2008 at 9:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Michel Thomas is great! I used MT Spanish and learned in about two weeks what would normally take serveral months!
The only thing that annoys me is pronunciation. All three of them seem to have very bad pronunciation, and I sometimes catch myself saying "lou" instead of "lo." The male student drives me crazy...his brain seems to shift in slo-mo. Regards, Ilhan 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| zorglub Pentaglot Senior Member France Joined 7001 days ago 441 posts - 504 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (Written), Turkish, Mandarin | Message 69 of 185 17 July 2008 at 9:52am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I heard a sample wow, MT 's accent is not native at all but the intonations are correct. For french speakers, there's a version of MT's Spanish teaching for froggies that uses a native teacher wit a nice voice. New MT programs (anything but German Italian French Spanish) use either a native teacher or a non native teacher with a native speaker. Arabic and Mandarin are very good IMO. I don't know about Russian. And DUtch, Portuguese (not Brazilian), japanese , POlish and Greek are coming ! i'll never keep up ! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7145 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 70 of 185 18 July 2008 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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There seems to be some new enthusiasm for the Michel Thomas courses here on the forum, as evidenced by this thread, as well as by various recommendations by some MT enthusiasts who seem to think these course are ideal for just about everyone.
I'm currently listening, in a rather pained way, to the MT Spanish course, and have some personal comments (below) that are a bit less euphoric than some I've read on the board recently. But before getting to my comments, I wanted to point out the following site that may be useful for both defenders and detractors of the Michel Thomas courses, as well as for those considering buying them. You can find "transcripts" of the "original" Michel Thomas courses at http://www.geocities.com/joekane765/ (By "original", I mean those by the man himself, in French, Italian, Spanish, and German, and not the various newer languages that are coming out. Also, I've found that, for some reason, the transcripts themselves do not show up on the latest version of Mozilla Firefox (3.0), although they worked fine on the older versions, and still work fine with the Opera browser.) At any rate, the transcripts may be useful for those seeking an idea to what is covered where in the course(s), or for people interested in seeing just what the courses teach. As for my own impressions, I find that while the method itself could be useful, especially for absolute beginners, there are some drawbacks, at least as judged by the first few disks of the Spanish course. For one thing, as noted in postings above, Michel Thomas's Spanish pronunciation is simply awful, and he misleads the students thereby. (He has a very strong accent in English as well.) He doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between stress and elongation for vowels, and so he draws out the stressed syllables to a ridiculous degree, sounding almost demented, as he tries to get the students to stress the syllables. (Ha-a-a-a-a-a-blo....) Worse, when the students pronounce the words essentially correctly but with a rather weak stress, he "corrects" them by lengthening the syllables to an absurd degree, which the students then imitate. He himself has trouble with the unstressed "e" at the end of a word like "evidente", pronouncing it like the final "e" in the German word "Leute". In short, if you want to learn how to pronounce Spanish, you'd better have some other resoucese to guide you, or you'll pick up some very incorrect notions of Spanish pronunciation. Unlike some audio-based courses wherein, despite the methods used, you at least get to hear a good deal of native speech in the language you're studying, almost the entire audio of the MT materials consists of the Great Man himself droning on in heavily accented English about the language in question, then asking the two students to translate English sentences into Spanish. You hear a good deal of stuttering on their part, then his correction of them. In other words, if you liked language classes in school, and listening to the teacher call on your classmates to construct sentences, then correct them, you'll feel right at home with Michel Thomas. Another negative, to my mind, is that, as far as I can tell, the method consists entirely of translation. You're given an English phrase or sentence, and then you translate it into Spanish. There's no dialogue, and no opportunity to listen to native (or even near-native) speech for comprehension purposes. It's one-way translation. The basic focus, judging by what I've heard so far and the written materials available at the site provided above, seems to be constructing sentences, with a relatively small vocabulary, in which grammatical elements take precedence over learning words. I think this may be useful for many people, especially out-and-out beginners or people studying their first language, as a way to develop confidence in one's ability to actually put a few words together in the language. So I would not advise anyone not to use the materials, although I do think a realistic awareness of the system's weaknesses is in order. I don't know why Michel Thomas didn't employ native speakers for his courses; I suspect it had to do with his evident ego. (As noted in other postings, the newer courses do have native speakers, which I see as an improvement.) He does employ some grammatical terminology, but for some reason seems to feel the need to redefine what the students have learned in school. He defines a verb, for instance, as "any word before which you can place the word 'to'". Thus, a word like, say, "Thailand" becomes a verb. For those interested in the series, the publisher's UK site has a discussion forum, revealingly labeled as a "fan club", where people discuss the courses and the method employed. Most of the participants seem to be "true believers", though, and there's a lot of gushing about what a "revolution in learning" the courses represent, etc. The forum seems to be run by the publisher, and so I have no idea whether more skeptical views are welcomed or tolerated. The forum is available at: http://pub8.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=657257956 I hope I haven't offended anyone by my less-than-enthusiastic comments on the Michel Thomas materials; it's clear that at least some people find them useful, which is what counts. But to me, they also have some serious limitations, and I wanted to point some of these out for those involved in comparing them with other possible study materials. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 71 of 185 18 July 2008 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I don't think so. I think the big problem with speed comes because Natasha introduces a lot of unlinked nouns. As I understand it, the Russian case system for nouns isn't much more complicated than the German one, but Thomas still didn't really look at nouns. Instead he focused on pronouns. The advantage of doing this is that nouns themselves are very easy to learn from context, and the forms of words are easy to learn, again from context. "Function words", words which like pronouns aren't linked to a particular object or action, are difficult to learn from context, because they can be used in all sorts of contexts. Grammatical structures are difficult to learn from context for similar reasons. So by teaching pronouns, Thomas does three things:
Now here Natasha's decision to use nouns has a double hit. Russian is more difficult to learn than German in terms of pronunciation. Not only does introducing a wide vocabulary reduce the amount of time devoted to the structures, it also means dealing with a larger set of new and unfamiliar phonemes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 72 of 185 18 July 2008 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'll admit that this did annoy me a bit while I was doing it, but I'd like to throw in a couple of observations here. On the Michel Thomas Russian course, the teacher doesn't do this, and the students make a lot of mistakes with misplaced stress. I was recently in Norway with work. One of the managers out there mispronounced a word in English, and one of my colleagues corrected him. He repeated it, and while his pronunciation of the sounds was slightly better, he completely failed to notice that what was being corrected was actually his misplaced stress. Later that day, one of my colleagues from the UK mispronounced the name of a Swedish town in which we have an office. The Norwegian manager corrected him. My colleague, like the manager, corrected his sounding, but not his misplaced stress. It appears that people in general are quite bad at noticing differences in word stress. And it's not just monolingual people -- the Norwegian manager knows at least three.
If you get a chance to listen to MT Russian, you'll find that the students on that course don't sound any better than the ones on the Spanish course by the end. You cannot learn pronunciation instantly by listening, whether that's listening to natives or non-natives. It takes a bit of work (not necessarily hard work, just careful work) to get there. The Michel Thomas Foundation and Advanced courses taken together probably constitute 24 hours of study time for most people -- that's not hellish much. By the end of your first 24 hours of study you won't normally have developed much of an accent one way of the other. Your brain is incapable of "hearing" the accent that early on, so you can't imitate it anyway.
But on the other side of the coin, one of the most reassuring things about studying in a class is seeing that your classmates are working at the same pace as you. I've been working on a Pimsleur course and I find myself always asking "why can't I get this?" when I make a mistake or draw a blank on a word. When I make a mistake doing Michel Thomas, I know it's OK because my classmates make mistakes too. And sometimes they're even the same ones.
But is that really necessary? At this point we're now getting into debates that have never been properly had. There is a widely held assumption that production follows comprehension. There is also a common school of thought that the two should be developed simultaneously. But then cutting-edge neuroscience is suggesting that perhaps production is actually the key to all language. The idea is that we understand any received input by reflexion -- what would I mean if I said it. Under this framework it makes perfect sense to work exclusively on productive skills. (It's all about mirror neurons and optical illusions, and if anyone wants me to drone on about my favour pet subject, I'll start another thread.) Now, are you really translating? The English sentences you are given are very unnatural and really aren't actually English. The problem any teacher has in producing a speaking activity is getting the students to know what to say. I have, as a learner been frustrated by the mismatch in what I know how to say and what I can say in class. I then end up having to think things out rather heavily and the process becomes quite laboured. The thing with translating MT's tuned prompts is that once you've heard it, you know what you want to say. Because he has chosen it, not you, you don't have to think about whether or not you can say it. Now I don't know about you, but when I'm having trouble working out what I'm going to say, I usually end up making up my answers in English anyway and then translating them. With MT, perhaps I am translating, but at least I'm not creating the sentence and then translating -- I'm producing the target language without producing English.
I'm sorry, language learning is full of confidence tricks, but this isn't one of them. It's things like "can do" statements and set phrases that develop confidence faster than ability. What Michel Thomas does is teach grammar -- structure. Words are pretty easy to learn. How many new words have you learnt in English recently? Does your boss incentivise you? Are lusers cybersqatting your domain name? Vocabulary takes care of itself in a way that grammar doesn't.
Agreed, although I do think most of your criticisms above arise from your assumptions of home language learning should be, not from a failure to learn through it. I was on a beginner's language course with a very good teacher, and several of the students were convinced that they weren't learning anything because she wasn't working to a published syllabus, she wasn't doing X, she wasn't doing Y... etc etc etc. But we all learned as much in a week as I would have expected from two. Nothing you have mentioned above -- non-native accent, productionwithout reception, low vocabulary -- has ever been proven to have a negative effect on the beginner and there's as much speculative theory saying it's good as it's bad, so I urge you to stop worrying about whether it should or shouldn't work and just experience that it does work. Don't talk yourself out of giving it a fair chance.
Don't forget the money. Michel must have made a lot of money by making sure he had no competition. (Trained teachers leave and set up their own schools. Then train other teachers, who leave and set up their own schools. All of a sudden, the MT method would have been a commodity and he wouldn't have been able to charge a single flat-rate fee for classes anywhere in the world. Yes, seriously -- all airfares and hotel bills were included in this fee. Classes would be held in his private hotel suite. If you were in London, he'd stay in the Ritz. The Ritz. He wouldn't have had nearly so much work if other people knew his method.)
Yes, I agree that this isn't particularly helpful.
If anyone is offended, then they fall into your cultish "true believer" category quite readily. I'm glad to see someone willing to air his concerns but not dismiss the courses out of hand. Of course it has limitations, but then any course is limited. I think one of the strengths is that Thomas recognised those limitations and did what he could to make the best of it. The limitations are not stuff that the course fails to teach certain things, but that it doesn't try to teach certain things. It doesn´t try to teach easy things, because we can learn them easily on our own. Edited by Cainntear on 18 July 2008 at 6:18pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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