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Mistakes in Michel Thomas courses | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes  Speaks: German*, English | Message 41 of 52 11 July 2011 at 8:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The G in Wohnung ['vo:nuŋ] is not pronounced like a regular G, but as a "velar nasal" /ŋ/ as in English sing.
Both verb forms are not identical: Das Haus wäre verkauft worden = Konjunktiv Plusquamperfekt [Aktiv] (active voice) Das Haus wäre verkauft gewesen = Konjunktiv Plusquamperfekt [Zustandspassiv] (passive voice) Forget about "Das Haus wäre verkauft gewesen". It's a theoretical form that you'll hardly ever encounter in real life. The best translation for "the house would have been sold" is "das Hause wäre verkauft worden." 3 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 42 of 52 11 July 2011 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Many thanks for that clarification.
A couple of questions: I realise that the verb forms are not identical (In fact I didn't say they were), but does the passive/active distinction in German change the translation into English (which, admitting that my English grammar is shaky, but 'the house would have been sold' is in the passive voice itself, is it not?) - and does it make Thomas' construction a 'mistake' as opposed to a grammatical rarety that would not be found in speech? Again, thanks in advance for your wisdom. Edited by Elexi on 11 July 2011 at 11:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 43 of 52 11 July 2011 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not really, and if a student translated "the house would have been sold" as "das Haus wäre verkauft gewesen" in a German morphology paper, the student could certainly argue that this verb form theoretically exists and could be interpreted in English as "the house would have been sold." However, since the MT course aims at teaching conversational German, "das Haus wäre verkauft worden" would have been a better choice since there's no point in exposing the students to verb forms that they'll most likely never hear and never use themselves.
It is indeed a passive form, but that's more or less irrelevant in this case since German verb tenses don't always match English verb tenses. For example, you can use German Perfekt verb forms in sentences that would require Past tense verb forms in English and Reported Speech is expressed with Konjunktiv verb forms in German and Past tense verb forms in English.
In terms of morphology he was correct, however in terms of teaching idiomatic German he wasn't. 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 44 of 52 11 July 2011 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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You can read exactly what Michel Thomas taught about the German tenses if you follow this link:-
http://www.michelthomas.co.uk/downloads.php, then go to pages 35 and 36 of the transcript of the Advanced Course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 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 45 of 52 11 July 2011 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
MT isn't a course in "conversational German" in the sense of idioms and phrases. It a course in German grammar taught through the spoken mode. He expressly avoids covering many idiomatic constructions. In principle, it's the right idea as it reduces the complexity to a manageable level, but in practice he sometimes picked really odd examples. His Romance language course get a lot of flack for such unnatural-sounding language as "it is not acceptable for me to do it that way". There's some justification to the criticism, but I still think it's by far the best thing currently available for beginners. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 46 of 52 11 July 2011 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
What I meant by "conversational German" was actually the opposite. I.e. simple sentence constructions without idioms and phrases. However, it seems to me that in the Advanced German course he sometimes unintentionally confused learners by unnecessarily differentiating between both English and German near-synonyms. For example, he gives both: "The house has gotten sold" and "The house has become sold" for "Das Haus ist verkauft worden," which most translators would simply translate as "The house has been sold" unless they wanted to put emphasis on the fact that someone finally bought the house. 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 47 of 52 11 July 2011 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
But I found the use of the English "get passive" very useful for getting a handle on the German passive. Of course the "get-passive" is very restricted on a pragmatic level in English, which is why the German passive is usually translated by the English true passive (with "to be"), but on the level of syntax the correspondence with the German passive is close enouigh to be very useful and not at all confusing. The English true passive, in contrast, *is* confusing as a tool for learning the German passive precisely *because* it translates both "Das Haus wäre verkauft worden" and "Das Haus wäre verkauft gewesen" as "the house would have been sold" (in contrast, "the house would have gotten sold" can only mean the first). And don't worry, you will not come away with a false sense of the frequency of these constructions because you are only meant to go through the course once (although the course is designed so that if your attention wanders you will start to get things wrong and so have to backtrack to where you lost the thread), it should only take somewhere between 2 days and 2 weeks, and then you are meant to move on to new things (and perhaps give it to a friend, or sell it on ebay, or something). Yo can't look at this like you would other courses, I mean I love Assimil and find FSI useful if boring, but you are meant to LEARN the content of an Assimil course over a sustained period of time (and worse still drill the FSI content to the point of overlearning!), this means mistakes are learned (perhaps even fossilized if drilled a lá FSI!) and so are very serious. With Michel Thomas it simply is not an important issue. Edited by Random review on 11 July 2011 at 10:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6913 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 48 of 52 16 July 2011 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I wrote a review recently for the Mandarin course and I got a bit annoyed about the pronunciation errors. I'm wondering now whether I overreacted a bit. Here's some of what I said:
In the end the main reason why I stopped using this course was the pace. It's so slow and really boring ... I struggled to stay awake quite often. I would be interested in hearing what opinion those of you who used this course have. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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