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Unofficial Michel Thomas courses project | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Neil_UK Tetraglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5260 days ago 50 posts - 64 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto, Welsh Studies: Polish, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic, French | Message 1 of 97 01 September 2011 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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We all know that Michel Thomas Method is one of the best and easiest language learning
methods in the world, but the problem is that not very many languages are available with this method. MT method has no plans to make courses for any more languages. A couple of people made some half-hearted attempts at home made Michel Thomas courses...somebody did half a course for Japanese, and another guy did a couple of Norwegian lesson, before giving up. My idea is to get a team of people together and create 'unofficial' Michel Thomas courses for the languages that aren't currently taught with MT Method. They will be hosted on a website and will be free for everyone to download. My idea is to make language learning more accessible to people by creating Michel Thomas type courses for as many languages as possible. Specifically, I'd like people to make courses for the following languages:- Swedish Hindi/Urdu Tagalog Indonesian Javanese Esperanto Cantonese Korean Vietnamese Thai Norwegian Danish Finnish Icelandic Welsh Scottish Gaelic Irish Gaelic Basque Catalan Modern Standard Arabic Gulf Arabic Moroccan Arabic Persian/Farsi Pashto Czech Slovak Turkish Romanian Lithuanian Bosnian/Serbian Hebrew Hungarian Malay Yiddish (If you think I've missed any important languages out of this list, please feel free to add more in). Basically, I would be willing to lead and coordinate the project, but I will need people who are native (or at least fluent) in each language to make the courses. You will be required to make an 8 hour foundation course, as well as a 4 hour advanced course. I will provide you with a template (in English) for the material you will need to cover. You will then have to make the relevant translations into the target language in order to design and teach the course. You'll also need to be creative and come up with useful ways to teach the structure of the language, as well as use neat little 'memory hooks' to help people remember vocab etc. Anyone who is familiar with MT Method courses will understand what I mean. Also, you MUST be willing to complete the entire course. If you're someone who starts things, but gives up and never completes them, then please don't get involved. We don't want people like those who started creating the Michel Thomas Japanese and Norwegian courses, who then gave up after a few lessons and left everybody disappointed. Once each course has been completed, I will also edit the material from each course into a 'review course', so that people can review the contents of the foundation and advanced courses in around an hour or 2 at most. Maybe we'll even do vocab courses for each of these languages too, if it goes well. So if you're interested, please reply here and we'll discuss it further. Tell me which language you wish to make a course for, and we'll hopefully get started on this soon. *EDIT and ADDITIONAL NOTE* - I've seen some replies to this post saying things like 'this idea won't work, blah blah blah', basically people trying to shun my idea and bring negativity to me and this thread. Please DO NOT reply to this thread if you are only here to say things like that. I didn't ask for unsolicited opinions as to whether this project is possible or not, so keep those comments to yourself. ONLY reply if you wish to help out with this project (or if you know someone who can), or if you have something positive and useful to add. Thanks. Edited by Neil_UK on 02 September 2011 at 7:40pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5413 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 2 of 97 02 September 2011 at 4:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Not to burst your bubble, but you're hardly in the position to outline so many requirements ("You will be required to make an 8 hour foundation course"; "you MUST be willing to complete the entire course") without actually having any leverage in the form of compensation, unless you're a philanthropist who intends to handsomely pay contributors for extremely time-consuming material that will be distributed to the public at zero cost.
Moreover, considering the incredible investment of time and effort such an undertaking would require, I'd imagine you're more in a position of "We'll take whatever we can get", rather than specifically calling on speakers of incredibly obscure languages like Javanese (there may be 76 million of them, but all 230 million Indonesians combined only comprise 0.9% of this website's visitors, and the likelihood of attracting a Javanese-literate registered user fluent in English who's willing to compose a twelve-hour course for a language that has practically zero foreign learners is essentially nil). Edited by nway on 02 September 2011 at 4:06am 20 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6377 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 97 02 September 2011 at 4:33am | IP Logged | ||
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I have to agree with nway, Your requests are totally unrealistic. Ever wonder why the other ones didn't get completed?
5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5020 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 97 02 September 2011 at 9:18am | IP Logged | ||
No one MUST do anything. If the people who did the Japanese and Norwegian courses offered thesse courses for free , then who is anyone to complain that they didnt complete them? You mention that you would be prepared to lead the project. I was wondering what kind of background you have that would enable you to do this effectively? On your list, there are a lot of vastly different languages, would they all need a different English tenplate, to reflect differences in the grammar? Edited by dbag on 02 September 2011 at 9:31am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5781 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 5 of 97 02 September 2011 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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@ dbag: if they are to be true MT courses they will indeed all need a different
template. Moreover, as Hodder found, even experienced teachers found it very difficult to copy this method, and some failed completely. The courses would take an incredible amount of time and effort if they were to be done properly, and the chances of Neil getting all his languages would be essentially zero. @ all: nevertheless, the fact that the general consensus in this forum seems to be that nobody would be willing to put in such a lot of effort into something creative, interesting and genuinely worthwhile without monetary recompense is depressing in the extreme! Some of the most worthwhile and helpful jobs are done by volunteers, at least here in the UK, and even on this site there is a homemade Assimil project. @ Neil_UK: if you are serious you will need to provide some sort of training and also aid in the form of advice, access to necessary books etc. Edited by Random review on 02 September 2011 at 2:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5609 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 6 of 97 02 September 2011 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds good in theory, in practice I doubt it'll take off for all the reasons mentioned above. Do you know the history of the Wikipedia? Originally in order
to contribute you had to be an expert in your field and each article was peer reviewed. Number of articles contributed in year one? 12. If you want to do this, create your template in English and allow anyone to copy it to another language and fill in whichever parts they want. It may just gain momentum and be completed or maybe not. But your original suggestion is definitely going nowhere. You can host a free Wiki here if you want: http://www.wikia.com/Wikia 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6227 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 7 of 97 02 September 2011 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | ||
What a noble (but monstrous) undertaking! It would be fantastic if this project could take off. The workload would be huge but it could be worth it. After all, many of us put in dozens of hours digitizing tapes for the original FSI.com site and it worked! I wish I could contribute myself, but my only native language is English. I'd be happy to be one of the students that struggles through the lecture with the native speaker though! :-) Perhaps a good goal is to start with the 8 Hour courses then tackle the Advanced courses. Also, have you looked into the legality of duplicating the courses? Let me know if I can help. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 97 02 September 2011 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | ||
It is rather depressing at first glance, but actually it makes a fair bit of sense. How many professionals create language courses for free or don't charge even a nominal fee for them? (and David Freedel's Russian course doesn't count because he agreed to give it away after it was no longer being used in a classroom, while FSI/DLI courses were never meant to be sold or redistributed to the public for free, and the courses' authors were being paid for their work by the government/taxpayers anyway). It takes a special kind of volunteer who not only has near-native fluency in the target language but also has the time and determination to create a self-contained course without ANY expectation of getting back the time and money spent. The people who could most likely make a consistent contribution to this project would be enthusiasts who are retired teachers of foreign languages or native speakers of the target language who are not working full-time. They'd have to put themselves through proofreading and recording interesting (e.g. dialogues) and not-so-interesting content (e.g. prompts for exercises with answers). Some time ago I tried to create a Slovak course based on the structure of DLI Basic Czech (to minimize the risk of copyright infringement), but the effort eventually died off after my having drafted a dozen or so chapters. It was easy enough to translate most of the Czech dialogues to Slovak but finding suitable photos (i.e. ones about Slovakia in the public domain or from my own camera were best), and creating exercises with their answer keys and accurate notes on grammar were a lot harder than I had thought. Ultimately I was a target user of such a course and so why would a student design the course that's intended to teach him/her? Part of the reason I wanted the course is that I believed that I still had (and still do have) more to learn than pass on - basically I was trying to create a course that would take me beyond all of the beginners' stuff that I had. On the other hand, why should I be creating a course when my knowledge is far from fluency. In addition coordinating my efforts with the few volunteers whom I managed to persuade was difficult, and getting them to record dialogues, readings and exercises didn't get very far. There were problems with time zones, and in the case of dialogues, it was best when the volunteers were recording their lines together so that the dialogues wouldn't seem clipped or "spliced". I offered even to pay them for the recordings, but out of principle they refused as we all viewed the project as something voluntary/altruistic. Even if they accepted payment, I would have quickly been forced to decide between paying the bills or paying for recordings of Slovak since my plan was to have about 15 min. of audio in Slovak per chapter and there would have been at least 20 chapters for the course. In any case, the need for this homemade Slovak course has faded with the wider availability of the professionally-made series "Hovorme spolu po slovensky. Slovenčina ako cudzí jazyk" which currently goes from A1 to B2 (levels for C1 and C2 are in preparation) and "Krížom-krážom" which currently goes from A1 to B1. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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