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Mistakes in Michel Thomas courses | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 33 of 52 13 January 2010 at 9:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Butter" is a good example. In many varieties of English, you don't hear an "R" sound in the word "butter" (the so-called "non-rhotic" accents), but the native speaker's phoneme map (internal model of the sounds of the language) recognises that this is an R phoneme, even though it's not phonetically an R. I.e. it means R, even if it doesn't say it. How do we know the native knows it's an R? Because when someone's "buttering you up", or having "buttered scones for tea", they do pronounce the R, so they clearly know it's there.
But there's a problem with this native sound map: English doesn't generally end words with an unstressed vowel. The main exception to this is Y (pretty, happy, easily) -- other than that we're really looking at borrowings (concierto, solo, pizza, pasta etc). What happens with these borrowings? Well, some people's phoneme map will recognise the ending as an R phoneme and will say (for example) "polkaring" rather than "polka-ing". This is a problem with all languages, but it's potentially worse in German than many others, because of all the words in English, native or borrowed, that end with an unstressed E sound, but German has both unstressed -e and unstressed -er endings. Of all the possible places to encounter a silent R, this is the worst. I didn't take notes, but I certainly heard a couple of instances on the CDs where an R sound was erroneously dropped or added by the student -- which suggests that they were trying to understand the language against their English phoneme map. Once you've got a phoneme map, you can apply accent to it, but if you start with accent, it may not convey sufficient phoneme information to the non-native ear. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| gammarayson Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5431 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English*, Danish Studies: German | Message 34 of 52 10 July 2011 at 2:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In the Advanced German Course CD 4 track 9 where Michel Thomas goes through all the tenses "The house would
have been sold" is mentioned twice but translated first as"Das Haus wäre verkauft worden" and later as "Das Haus wäre verkauft gewesen". Surely, in the first case, he should have asked,"How do you say: The house would have GOTTEN sold"? The transcripts confirm that he gives 2 different translations for the same sentence. Also, his insistence that the G ending in Wohnung etc be pronounced is a bit annoying. I haven't noticed this pronunciation in native speakers. Otherwise I love the course and his way of explaining the structure of the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5668 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 35 of 52 10 July 2011 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
I only speak modern British English, and nowadays at least, "gotten" tends to be specific to American English. It seems to have a very fluid meaning as far as I can tell. However, you are clearly using "gotten" here to mean something very specific and I can't work out the distinction (in this context) from "been". Would you elaborate please? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| gammarayson Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5431 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English*, Danish Studies: German | Message 36 of 52 10 July 2011 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hello Anthony, I have found your youtube videos very interesting,thanks. There may be a subtlety here that I am
missing,or which Michel Thomas doesn't elaborate on in the course. I too speak British English and agree that "gotten" is specific for American English. Nevertheless, as Thomas uses it when going through the tenses e.g. when he is describing the difference in meaning between "Alles ist verkauft gewesen"(Everything has BEEN sold) and "Alles ist verkauft worden "(Everything has GOTTEN sold).Obviously they are slightly artificial sentences for the purpose of demonstrating grammatical points.However,later he goes through the German tenses one by one. I'm just puzzled when he twice asks for a translation of the sentence "The house would have been sold", but gives 2 different answers ie "Das Haus wäre verkauft worden" and "Das Haus wäre verkauft gewesen". I just suspect he meant to ask 2 different questions instead of the same one twice! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ncruz Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5537 days ago 31 posts - 56 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Dutch, Portuguese, Afrikaans Studies: French, German, Italian, Russian, Norwegian, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic | Message 37 of 52 10 July 2011 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think that he, like many other Polish Jews, was a native speaker of Yiddish. The fact that Yiddish and German are closely related could be the reason for his German-sounding accent and could, perhaps, explain some of his mistakes in German. Edited by Ncruz on 10 July 2011 at 10:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5564 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 38 of 52 10 July 2011 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I always understood 'Das Haus wäre verkauft worden" and "Das Haus wäre verkauft gewesen" to be two ways of saying essentially the same thing - a distintion without a difference. I asked my wife (who is a German) and she agrees. So, Mr Thomas may not be wrong after all.
He also grew up in Breslau (now Wroclaw) which was (until post WWII) a German city and a Nazi stronghold - so German would have been spoken not Polish. Edited by Elexi on 10 July 2011 at 11:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5782 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 39 of 52 11 July 2011 at 12:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's been a long time since I posted on this site- mainly because I have been unable to
finish another thread I started, and was a bit embarrassed, but this thread has provoked me into it. The first couple of pages in this thread make these courses look AWFUL, and Michel Thomas look like an absolute charlatan! Anyone familiar with the Michel Thomas courses will know immediately that the thread is missing the point completely from the fact that it makes the awful "new" Michel Thomas courses (no mistakes, native pronunciation) look better than the originals! These are not courses you are meant to LEARN, you are positively forbidden to try to memorize ANYTHING, they are a launchpad into the language. You are supposed to finish them within a few weeks and then (in spite of what Rose-Lee Hayden claims) never use them again! Trust me, having used a couple of FSI courses I can tell you with confidence that errors do not fossilize in a few weeks. Actually many people (I was one) find the original courses so fascinating that they fly through them in just a few days! I learnt Spanish with the Michel Thomas Foundation Course followed by traditional methods (the so-called Advanced Course was not available when I started) and I can tell you that I never have any difficulty with any aspect of grammar he taught in that course; whereas I still make lots of errors with thee things I learned traditionally. I lived in Spain for a year in 2008 and lost count of the times I said something like, ¿Quieres que lo hago? only to realize straight after the conversation that I should have used the subjunctive, this does not happen with grammar I learned from Michel Thomas, I wish I knew why so I could improve. Of course the courses would be better without the errors, but they are what they are i.e. (as Cainntear said above) the best introduction to a language. I know he does start to touch on the subjunctive in the Advanced Course, but I admit that the title is a misnomer, he was a bit of a blowhard by the look of things. I have claimed elsewhere on this forum that the worst thing about these courses is that he died before he finished them, but since nobody at Hodder seems to have a clue how his method really worked that will probably never be remedied. Regarding the specific errors mentioned above the pronunciation of the Spanish "z" like the Spanish "d" and the English "z" would be a very serious error, but it is not continued, so please don't think that by doing this course you will come away with this weird accent. I wonder if he was using the mispronunciation to exaggerate the differences between European and American Spanish as a pedagogical technique, or perhaps he just confused himself briefly (the CDs were recorded live, he taught from memory, and was in his 80s, a few times in the recordings you can hear him briefly tie himself up in knots!). I don't remember him saying that there was no such thing as the future continuous in Spanish (admittedly it's been years since I listened to the course), are you sure you are not thinking about where he (correctly) informs that you cannot use the present continuous to express the future like we do in English (for instance you cannot say, "lo estoy haciendo mañana")? You know only the other week I saw another Michel Thomas "error" turn out to possible. My grammar books say that esperar in the present tense can be followed only by the subjunctive mood (or "a + subjunctive" when it means "to wait") or the future tense (and in the negative only by the subjunctive), In his "Spanish Language Builder" he uses esperar followed by "ir a" (I forget the exact sentence) and I assumed this was an error, yet only the other week I came across exactly this structure in something written by a native speaker (I'll try to find where) so if it's an error it's one native speakers can make too! Edited by Random review on 11 July 2011 at 1:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5782 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 40 of 52 11 July 2011 at 12:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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@Ncruz: I think you are right about the Yiddish thing, in his German "Advanced Course" he
teaches "I want that he should do it" (i.e. using sollen) as the way to say, "I want him to do it" in German. I don't actually know whether this is incorrect in German or not, but it's certainly not what they normally say! What Germans say is, "I want that he does it." My understanding is that the pattern with should (sollen) is exactly what you say in Yiddish. That said it is important not to get too worried about these things, I think we are talking about another brief moment of confusion, his German was of a very high level (certainly better than his other languages) and he does not teach other more seriously wrong possible Yiddish patterns like "ich wasche sich". 1 person has voted this message useful |
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