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Where are all the other Michel Thomases? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5783 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 1 of 15 21 July 2011 at 3:17am | IP Logged | ||
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I know from my own experience that there are many brilliant teachers out there, and yet
the only one who seems to have published any language courses is Michel Thomas, why? At some point in the last year I made the standard "grumpy old man" moan to someone that there does not seem to be nearly as much good music around as say 40 or 50 years ago. He, much more knowledgeable about music than I, responded that there is LOTS of good new music out there, that you just don't find much of it in the charts anymore. As well as bands I have never heard of he even gave examples of bands I did know whose best work never made it to the charts! The problem is the Music Industry (those very people that get such high salaries for doing such a "great job" bringing us the best talent!). Ringing any bells, language learners? Rosetta Stone at "No 1 in the Charts" and only aficionados have even heard of, say, Assimil? It has often been commented that Michel Thomas had a difficult personality, but perhaps only those great teachers with such a personality could at that time escape the clutches of the Education Industry enough to produce great courses. Now real music buffs, like my friend, can find great music on the web (I'm talking about music made available on the web by bands themselves, who make their money playing; not illegal downloads), bypassing the industry completely. Might other great teachers, as or more talented than Michel Thomas be posting amazing stuff in obscure corners of the web as we speak? An example of something much better than most commercially published material, and free, here. Edited by Random review on 21 July 2011 at 4:12am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kagemusha Newbie United States Joined 4924 days ago 35 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 15 21 July 2011 at 3:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Great teachers may not want to go commercial. They would rather work with a small group of
passionate language learners then get into an overcrowded commercial market. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5783 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 3 of 15 21 July 2011 at 3:29am | IP Logged | ||
Exactly, but with the internet they can now publish some of their stuff too, without getting drawn into all that (e.g. see my link above). Edited by Random review on 21 July 2011 at 3:29am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kagemusha Newbie United States Joined 4924 days ago 35 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 15 21 July 2011 at 3:44am | IP Logged | ||
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You can find them if you do some searching. Some have websites and/or Youtube channels.
Like Professor Arguelles. http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5415 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 5 of 15 21 July 2011 at 3:59am | IP Logged | ||
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There are a lot of great language teachers on YouTube. They might not all be planned out according to a premeditated approach (creators of original content on YouTube tend to "wing it" as they go), but many of them are organized into an effective and approachable curriculum. I will concede that none of them follow the MT approach of sharing lexical etymologies and all that other jazz that makes the MT courses feel like a "journey".
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5783 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 6 of 15 21 July 2011 at 4:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I've seen Prof Arguelles' stuff already, I can't remember anymore, but I wouldn't be
surprised if it was his work that put me wise to Assimil, thanks anyway. To be honest that's pretty much what I was hoping for: that people would suggest work they have seen. And thanks Nway, don't worry, just because I believe MT's stuff is the by far the best commercially available doesn't mean I think he's the last word ha ha! The problem is (as ever with the internet) how to find the gems among all the rubbish. Don't you think? Edited by Random review on 21 July 2011 at 4:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5415 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 7 of 15 21 July 2011 at 7:54am | IP Logged | ||
Since there are probably quite a few people looking for the same thing, I'll go ahead and post some of the best resources I've come across. This is all subjective, of course, and it's fitting that you used music as an analogy, considering music taste might just be the most subjective thing outside of politics... Spanish - Professor Jason Nothing fancy — just very well done Spanish instruction from an extremely knowledgeable non-native speaker. His latter videos make excellent use of visuals (meaning simplicity and clarity — no extraneous distractions). Brazilian Portuguese - Professor Jason Yes, the same guy who's a great Spanish teacher is also a great Portuguese teacher. As with his Spanish videos, he's willing to dig deep into pronunciation and grammar, rather than just dropping a bunch of aimless vocabulary and phrases. Korean - BusyAtom JB There are a ton of people teaching Korean on the Internet, but none of them come close to the clarity, depth, and breadth of this course. Some of these videos are up to an hour long, which ought to make it clear that this isn't your typical YouTube "guru" dropping a bunch of 5-minute videos that are useless to the serious language learner looking for a long-term course. Russian - Viktor D. Huliganov Not personally my style, due to his quiet speaking voice, but he has an incredibly devout group of followers, and with 13 hours of content across 47 videos, it's hard to beat this level of comprehensiveness. He's all about the cold, hard mechanics of Russian grammar, so grammarphobes beware. French - Imagiers By far the most visually professional of all the resources listed here (no guy-in-front-of-the-camera — just a voice and clear-cut illustrations), but it's to an even greater extent the most comprehensive — a whopping 238,332 videos. It's actually quite intimidating, as there are more playlists than most of the other teachers listed here even have videos, but for the serious French learner looking for a comprehensive and encyclopedic resource, this is the jackpot. Vietnamese - Tu Hoang Yen This is quite different from all the other resources listed here — the teacher is a young teenage girl from Vietnam with a massive (and rather cacophonous) accent and who decorates her lessons with cutesy anime pictures. That said, the reason I'm including this is because it's an extremely well-organized and comprehensive introduction to the Vietnamese language that demonstrates a sophisticated pedagogical understanding exceeding what one might expect from someone her age. Latin - TuTubus An incredibly delicious Latin course. It's obviously not by a native speaker, but this is a well-articulated course that avoids the academic dryness that most Latin students have probably had to endure. Norwegian - NorwegianClasd A rather short course, but decent online Norwegian courses are hard to come by, and this is a solid introduction to the new learner. This isn't as comprehensive or organized as some of the other courses listed here, but the teacher's a smart guy who knows how to explain the Norwegian language to English speakers. Mandarin - Mike Needless to say, there is no dearth of Mandarin language resources on the Internet. But they tend to be plagued by the same recurring problems — either a native English speaker who's not very good at Mandarin; a native Mandarin speaker who's not very good at English; or simply a dry or boring approach that fails to teach Mandarin in an accessible manner. Mike's a native English speaker who knows his Chinese and, just as importantly, knows how to teach it to other English speakers. Despite its intentional silliness, this course is very well planned out. Japanese - Tae Kim Unlike the other resources listed so far, this course is all text — no video. Nonetheless, it's an incredibly comprehensive online textbook invaluable for the serious student of Japanese. Khmer - Khmer School Needless to say, there aren't a whole lot of Khmer language instruction videos on the Internet. There are handful of them, but this is the most organized and comprehensive collection. The teacher is a Western heritage speaker (I'm guessing Cambodian American), and he's provided a rather invaluable collection for a language that otherwise would be quite inaccessible. Hindi - Sam This is quite a short collection, but it's unique in that this non-European language is taught from a very linguistics-savvy native speaker. He actually starts the course by teaching the International Phonetic Alphabet, so as to accurately teach the Devanagari script. This course is rather dry, but it's probably, aside from its length, the best available for this severely underrepresented language online. I unfortunately don't have time to discuss more resources at length, but I'll go ahead and list a few more. I have no doubt that someone of the resources listed below are better than some of the resources listed above, so don't get the idea that they're not worth checking out just because they weren't discussed at length above. German - Deutch Online Lernen German - Deutche Welle Russian - Russia Today Russian - Milla Park Mandarin - Sophia Qian Cantonese - Chinese Lessons Shanghainese - ChinesePod Japanese - Kanji Damage Korean - Jenny Lee Indonesian / Thai - Langhub Tagalog / Vietnamese - Bud Brown Plus, the polyglot teachers: Tibetan / Hmong / Yoruba / Navajo - Moses McCormick (pretty sure he has an account here...) Mandarin / Hakka / S. Min (Taiwanese/Hokkien) / Shanghainese / Mongolian - Mike Campbell Turkish / Ido / Afrikaans / German / Norwegian / Chinese / Korean - Page F30 (highly recommended and extremely insightful) Finally, for the polyglot learners: Learning Mandarin using Korean - Seemile Learning Korean using Mandarin - Seemile Learning Korean using Japanese - Seemile Learning Mandarin using Spanish - Toda China (not great, but included due to the rare combination; search: "aprender chino" to narrow video selection) Well, that's enough for now. There are of course many more, but it's approaching midnight, and I work full time and have a midterm to study for. -_- 35 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 15 21 July 2011 at 10:17am | IP Logged | ||
Probably because very few good teachers now why they're good teachers. Don't misinterpret me - this is not an attack on teachers (although perhaps it's an attack on the teaching profession...) The unique thing about the Michel Thomas courses is that they are not a scripted course -- he's teaching two students, and you're listening to an off-the-cuff class. When people sit down to write courses, they do it based on what they think they do, which is often very different from what they do. Things that are incidental in reality are often presented as core principles. MT himself suffered from the same problem. On the documentary The Language Master, you hear him talk about using "it's a fair thing to do" to teach "faire"(to do/make) in French. But he is oblivious to the fact that he teaches "fare" (Italian) and "hacer" (Spanish) perfectly well without any mnemonic. Two guys went to him to write a book on his method -- neither ever published a book. I don't think Thomas himself really understood everything about his own teaching, and he was a psychologist who started teaching in order to examine the learning process. What chance do teachers who came through the normal path of teacher training have? 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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