coyote Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6243 days ago 32 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French
| Message 249 of 405 05 March 2009 at 4:11pm | IP Logged |
I see where there are two recent books on the MT method--one by Jonathan Solity and the other by Wyatt Woodsmall. Do these books cover MT's method in depth, and clearly, without the usual psycho-babble? Anyone read both of them? How do they compare? Are they useful for a foreign language instructor?
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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 250 of 405 06 March 2009 at 6:26pm | IP Logged |
Wyatt Woodsmall's book was never published, as far as I'm aware, and looked at it from the perspective of Neuro-Linguistic Programming... which probably qualifies it as psychobabble.
Solity's book is, to mind mind, one step back from what Thomas really does. It does contain a few good insights on the order of teaching, but mostly it talks about general principles from instructional psychology without relating them identifiably to Thomas's work.
It's not a book that's of immediate use to the syllabus designer, but I'd say it's still worth a read (library time!).
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Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 251 of 405 07 March 2009 at 1:19am | IP Logged |
Oh well. The Mandarin course is not suited for anyone with grapheme-colour synaesthesia.
Edited by Bao on 07 March 2009 at 1:20am
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coyote Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6243 days ago 32 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French
| Message 252 of 405 07 March 2009 at 5:36am | IP Logged |
Yes Cainntear, Woodsmall and his wife (?) do have a book out on the MT method. It's called The Future of Learning, and Amazon.com carries it. In the last few days, someone has reviewed it on the Amazon site. The review is not very favorable.
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Joshua Sevalis Diglot Newbie Joined 5682 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English, French
| Message 253 of 405 06 May 2009 at 3:21pm | IP Logged |
Interestingly, the fans of the courses are now putting together transcripts for the Michel Thomas Method Vocabulary Courses on their fan forum, so that the course can be read through and reviewed.
See here:
http://pub8.bravenet.com/forum/static/show.php?usernum=65725 7956&frmid=16&msgid=0
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ficticius Pro Member United States Joined 6108 days ago 23 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German Personal Language Map
| Message 254 of 405 06 May 2009 at 4:33pm | IP Logged |
The link has been deleted. Can you provide an alternative?
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unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6915 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin
| Message 256 of 405 03 August 2009 at 6:02pm | IP Logged |
I've just bought the complete Michel Thomas Italian course (old edition), managed to find it for £1!! Bargain.
I really like the old Michel Thomas courses, but I recently bought the new Mandarin course and I'm a little disappointed in it. It moves so slowly that I find it really difficult to keep my concentration. I think it's probably very helpful for someone who has never tried learning a tonal/Asian language before, but as I've already studied Cantonese before I found the pace way too slow.
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