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Michel Thomas | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| 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 73 of 185 18 July 2008 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Wow what a rant !
I don't know about the courses led by MT himself, but his method as applied by others impressed me quite a lot (Mandarin and Arabic). Indeed, they are for absolute beginners. thats where they are at their best, I think. I've heard a few samples of his own courses, yes he has a less than pleasant pronunciation, to say te least, even in English. I deem this a drawback too. But I know 2 persons who used a remasterised version of his English and Spanish for french speakers, using a native for Spanish and a Frenchman (I think, his English sounding more natural tan his English) with a more than correct English pronunciation, and it helped them a lot though they weren't beginners. it essentally helped them build new sentences. In addition these course are quite brief. OF COURSE you have to build upon that afterwards. The post MT MT methods for mandarin and Arabic explain some grammar, but it never reminded language learning at school. really not. I'd have loved being taught this way. it's grammar for dummies, made really easy. Yes it is for beginners, essentially. Yes there is a real problem with starting with a non native speaker.
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| 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 74 of 185 18 July 2008 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't agree. i think you can, because I did, and i'm no musician, using an audio only method first. Of course you need natives for this or native-like speakers. Of course you need to understand that correct pronunciation and particularly correct stressing is very important to be understood. Thus you need to work at repeating as closely as possible what the speaker says. I found this to be a drawback of the Pimsleur method, the pronunciation I achieved frequently was misleading to people I talked to , they inferred I couled speak the language and understad it when I only could say (well) a few basic sentences. 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 75 of 185 18 July 2008 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Please do start a thread on the Mirror Neurons please do.. But I don't get your point about mirror neurons here(a fascinating Nobel Award level discovery). According to the mirror neuron schemes of learning you actually have to see (so far see, maybe listen in singing birds) an action to learn how to do it. ========== I love your sentence "Vocabulary takes care of itself in a way that grammar doesn't. " Very well taken post. And , by ze waye, Daristani, you can criticize MT on Hodder's fan club forum. Edited by zorglub on 18 July 2008 at 6:32pm 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 76 of 185 19 July 2008 at 5:41am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Please be clear on this -- I am not suggesting that you cannot learn through an audio-only method of learning. If I was, I would be obviously wrong as a some people demonstrably have learned through these methods. I said that you cannot learn pronunciation instantly by listening. When you first start listening to a new language, your brain doesn't perceive every nuance of the sound. As your ability in the language improves, your brain starts to recognise the sounds as meaningful; it is only once the brain knows that it's meaningful that it will start to perceive it correctly.
Yes, but at first you won't repeat it all that closely, and this leads to a crucial point: If (in the early stages of learning) imitating a non-native produces as good an approximation of correct pronunciation as imitating a native speaker, then there is no perceptible benefit to having a native speaker as a teacher. Thus native listening can be introduced after initial education (20-40 hours) with no ill effect on the student.
You're a successful language learner. Whether you are a musician or not, you have in all probability developed a good phonetic awareness. This means that you are more open to new sounds, or more able to relate them to the sounds in the many languages you already know. And this is the problem I have when polyglots try to advise new learners -- they describe the techniques that they do now. But I have learnt phonetic awareness: I am aware of various grammatical concepts. I don't have to learn these, but a beginner does. What I do to learn a language isn't much use to someone who has yet to develop these skills. Edited by Cainntear on 19 July 2008 at 9:26am 4 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 77 of 185 19 July 2008 at 6:59am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I've posted a miniature essay in the General discussion forum. But to quickly answer your query: mirror neuron theory says that you can learn by observing, not that you have to observe in order to learn. But mirror theory isn't just about learning -- the mirror response is stronger where the action we observe is one we are familiar with doing ourselves, so if we can train an action or habit in ourselves, it becomes easier to observe it in others. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7145 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 78 of 185 19 July 2008 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Cainntear and Zorglub, thanks for you thoughtful comments. Truly, I didn’t intend either to praise or to bury Michel Thomas, and certainly not to write a “rant”, but simply to provide some comments from my own perspective based on what I’ve seen in the Spanish course. (Actually, Zorglub, it was your own detailed praise for the MT Arabic course, as well as Harold Goodman’s earlier comments on the Mandarin course, that got me interested in the method. But I decided to start with one of the “original” courses to try to get a feel for the method itself as practiced by its originator.) I didn’t intend to start an argument with those who find the courses useful, or even with those who see them as the “Holy Grail” of language learning, but simply to provide a counterweight to some of the presumably sincere but to my view insufficiently critical comments that have appeared in the forum recently, primarily for the benefit of people comparing the MT courses with other materials for possible use.
As I said above, I think that the method, such as it is, may have some value, especially for rank beginners, although I find Michael Thomas himself, as distinct from his method, to be rather ineffective as a teacher. I agree completely with Cainntear in the comment above: “a grumpy old man who doesn't have very much charisma -- as a teacher he's merely adequate”. Frankly, judging by his own “philosophy” that it’s the teacher who’s responsible for the students’ learning, I think the latter description is generous. If, at the end of the course of intensive, 2-on-1 instruction, the students are still making rather major errors in pronunciation, this has to be laid at the feet of the teacher. As to whether or not proper pronunciation can be “taught” or “learned” in a classroom situation, clearly there are variables. Certainly, for speakers of English, some languages present more and/or different problems than others. As far as stress is concerned, the variable stress of Russian, combined with the separate phenomena of palatalization and vowel reduction, make Russian harder for English learners to learn to pronounce properly than some other languages. The Scandinavian languages with their dual stress patterns are also trickier to get a grip on. But Spanish, in comparison, is notoriously easy to pronounce, if not like a native, then at least in an acceptable way. It should be a simple matter for any language teacher to illustrate contrasting stress patterns in two-syllable words through minimal pairs, e.g., HA-blo versus ha-BLO. But Michel Thomas can’t seem to express the differences in a way that his students comprehend. (Indeed, their incomprehension is clear from the difficulties they have in getting the stress right based on his “explanations”, which are not helped by his use of his own particular jargon, such as “push” instead of “stress”, and his absurd elongation of the stressed syllables in a language that, to my knowledge, does not have long vowels.) In my view, pronunciation is learned largely by imitation, aided by some explanation where necessary, so that, with repeated effort and successive approximation, you get closer to a “native” or at least an acceptable pronunciation. Imitation by itself may not be sufficient; if the same phonemes exist in one’s native language, then this may be all that’s needed, but if there are subtle but nonetheless meaningful distinctions that don’t exist in one’s native language, then more explanation is required. (Here, I’m thinking of the distinctions among “sh” and “x”, or “ch” and “q”, in Chinese, or the emphatic consonants in Arabic, etc. These distinctions need to be pointed out initially, and then practiced, and listened for carefully in the speech of others.) But Spanish, and particularly Spanish stress, is relatively simple in this regard, and from what I’ve heard so far, Michel Thomas simply drops the ball here, both in terms of his own poor pronunciation and the difficulties of his students, which he seems unable to remediate. (The FSI Spanish courses, by the way, provide lots of practice and explanation on stress patterns, as well as on fine vowel and consonant distinctions. They may do a fair amount of overkill on this, but at least they cover pronunciation in an explicit way, contrasted with (American) English, in which everyone ought to be able to develop an acceptable pronunciation.) As for the classroom analogy that I drew above, maybe there is some psychological value in hearing others around you stutter and stumble around, in terms of reassuring yourself that you’re not doing worse than the others. Personally, I find it frustrating to sit in such classrooms, and thus prefer to study in a way that provides me more of the language itself, as used by natives, rather than sitting there while others try laboriously to construct lengthy sentences. Regardless of how helpful the classroom situation may or may not be, however, I think that my comment that listening to a Michel Thomas tape is like sitting in a classroom is accurate, as it is indeed a tape of a language class with two students. In terms of knowing that “it’s OK” to make mistakes, and even the same mistakes as others, all I can say is that of course it’s OK, whether you make those mistakes listening to Michel Thomas or Pimsleur; you’re still a learner, and it’s a foreign language, and so mistakes are part of the process. If I learn something once and practice it a few times and get it right every time, maybe it’s because I’m brilliant, or maybe it’s because it’s just something really simple and easy to learn. (Most likely the latter!) But what it really means is that I’ve pretty much got that down, and so can use that “piece” of the language effectively. My mistakes, and hearing the corrections, are just a part of the process. I see this is getting awfully long, and so will try to sum up my ideas here rather than drone on any longer: Here’s where I think that the Michel Thomas method may have some utility (and rereading the earlier comments, I think I’m in agreement with Cainntear): He seems to have picked some of the important structural “pieces” of the language, ignoring a lot of the fine distinctions and irregularities that most classroom teachers and textbooks seem to feel the need to stress, and then using them, with an exceedingly small vocabulary, in a way that one gets a feel for the way the language “works” in a very “bare bones” way. Judging from what I’ve heard so far, and from looking at the transcripts, this largely consists of the main verb forms, and especially modal verbs, and the pronouns. These structural elements suffice to make some lengthy sentences, and so the student gains confidence from being able to do so. This method per se strikes me as essentially sound, and indeed reflects to a large degree my own “ideal” language method, which focuses on developing a familiarity with grammatical essentials while using a relatively small vocabulary. (My biggest complaint about most language books/programs is that they throw too much vocabulary at the learner too soon.) So the method, to the extent that I understand it from my own observations and the comments of others, looks right to me. The actual performance by Michel Thomas, as evidenced in the Spanish course, seems to fall short of the ideal. (I can’t comment on the newer courses, but presume they’re similar, with the added benefit of having native speakers.) At any rate, as Cainntear urged, I plan to keep working through the course, despite my irritation at much of what I hear on the tapes. 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 79 of 185 19 July 2008 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
yes , that's a good point. It has to be different to learn new languages once you've been exposed to other languages. 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 80 of 185 19 July 2008 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It now pops up to my mind that what I like with Pimsleur Assimil and the Post-Michel Thomas Michel Thomas courses I used is:
They are methods that work for the lazy or hurried learner who can use them driving prudently, running or walking the dog, doing low brain consuming activity: -obviously Pimsleur - certainly michel thomas - the phase of Assimil where you can use the audiotracks without the book (post-deciphering shadowing phase). They are not boring to me. OCntrary to Platiquemos which I'm told is very much like FSI but i found it really boring. Intuitively a very good method for the motivated serious learner. They are very quickly rewarding. One gives a lot of vocabulary and idioms, that can be retained, not learnt. And a good deal of grammatical explanation, avoiding the old style school teaching grammary learning, that's Assimil. ANd it's not noring to me. It has many diferent voices too, which is good. One sets you ready with survival skills, but little ability to understand when dipped into the foreign country: that's Pimsleur One makes you understand the grammary painlessly. Well, the essentials, while giving you little vocab and very little ability to understand : Michel thomas. The same one is a very good introduction to a new language from scratch, it seems, with the drawback of pronunciation for the MT taught courses. But maybe his pronunciation of German and french is better than that of Spanish and Italian ? I do not know how I'll go ahead with Arabic. Assimil ? the recordings are veeeery slow? Maybe I should have a try at linguaphone ? Any suggestion for a hurried / lazy learner ? PS "rant" was an inappropriate description of Daristani's post: Sorry. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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