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Learning a language in two days | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Welltravelled Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5862 days ago 46 posts - 72 votes  Speaks: English*, French | Message 25 of 49 19 May 2011 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
There was a discussion about this on a thread a while ago - it went on for quite a while - and discussed how MT probably was not the first one to give this type of course. A couple of teachers in particular (Margarita Madrigal being the most central) were mentioned. Personally I thought it was extremely interesting. From the courses I have used I think that there has been a group of people doing what MT did and what PN does. Just like you say: "teaching structures and words in a specific order is something anyone can do, as long as you have the appropriate personality to be an engaging teacher". I have used Michel Thomas's German courses, together with Margarita Madrigal's Magic key to German and the similarities are so uncanny it's almost a joke. Only her books survive but apparently they are simply the written form of how she taught in class in the 30s and 40s. So like you say either there's "no need to credit anyone with anything" or MT and everyone else should be crediting everyone else who ever did anything similar. Personally I find tracing the links between these courses very interesting. They strike me as a family of courses, with Madrigal as the grandmother - unless someone knows of a course even earlier than the ones she wrote. Also in-spite of the limited vocabularies these sorts of courses teach I think they are great. I am now working on Assimil German with Ease and Assimil German without Toil which are fantastic. But I am glad I started with MT and Madrigal first. By the way, the long discussion on that thread which talks about the - dare I call it the Margarita Madrigal Method? - can be read on the link below. It is seriously interesting. It's here: EDIT: See hrhenry's post immediately below for "The correct link" to the Michel Thomas / Margarita Madrigal Method discussion - I can't seem to post the link properly myself. Edited by Welltravelled on 19 May 2011 at 6:18pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 26 of 49 19 May 2011 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
Unrelated to the thread, but I've seen this problem crop up in the last few days with several links. They appear to get seriously munged when copying and pasting the URL as text (not talking about spaces in the URL - talking about HTML being shown as part of the link itself). The correct Link R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Welltravelled Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5862 days ago 46 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 27 of 49 19 May 2011 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for that hrhenry. I just couldn't get the link to work no matter what.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 28 of 49 19 May 2011 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
No problem. Just for reference, when you start or reply to a thread, the format tools are above the comment box. The tool to add a link is the fourth icon from the left. If you use the tool(s), the formatting will be correct. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 29 of 49 19 May 2011 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't see the need to get worked up over this. In my opinion, PN isn't saying you don't have to learn a lot of words. He simply says you don't have a learn a lot of words immediately. Sure, he could have called his courses "An Introduction To..." or "My First Steps in..", but that's not very sexy. Does anybody taking one of his courses expect to come out speaking like a native after two days? Let's not be silly. As I write this, I'm looking at a course offering at a local community center. For $99 CAD plus books I can take a Beginning Mandarin course for 2 hours a week during 10 weeks. A total of 20 hours. There will be about 20-25 people in the class. This looks like a better deal than 15 hours over two days with PN at three times the price. How much Mandarin will I know after 20 hours? Will I be "speaking Mandarin with confidence" after 20 hours? From what I've seen of these courses, they're pretty deadly and half the people drop out after a couple of weeks. Neither does the thought of going every Wednesday night for 10 weeks excite me. Now, an intensive weekend sounds like fun. It's 15 hours instead of 20 and much more expensive, but could a small group of 4-6 people do in two days what a group of 20-25 does in 20 hours stretched over 10 weeks? I think so. Which one is snake-oil? If we disregard the marketing hype and any illusions of speaking like a native after two days, I see this sort of two-day intensive as a kind of boot camp. It revs you up rather than dragging you down and out over 10 weeks. I'm not sure that the 20-hour course will make me better equipped to parachute into a village of natives who know only Mandarin. That's not the goal. Personally, I would love to do a two-day Mandarin intensive. I find the idea much more exciting than having to stretch the initial learning process over ten weeks. 1 person has 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 30 of 49 19 May 2011 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm with s_allard on this one, and I think your phrase "scratching the surface" is unjustified. I would say that vocabulary is always superficial, and that all the depth in the language is in the grammar. I agree that intensive vocabulary lessons are a waste of contact time, and poor value for money. Why? There is hardly any grammar in a language, and most advanced grammar is a combination of items of elementary grammar. Vocabulary, on the other hand, is huge. A teacher cannot teach vocabulary thoroughly, but can teach grammar thoroughly. Any attempt to teach a lot of vocabulary will be superficial, and will steal time from grammar teaching, leading to the grammar teaching becoming superficial too. Worse, when a student is trying to construct a complex sentence, there often isn't time to recall both the grammar and the vocabulary. This is why many learners who "know the rules" often end up spitting out a stream of concrete nouns and unconjugated infinitives. Removing the cognitive load of vocabulary recall lets the student focus on form. Once the grammatical form can be recalled (near) effortlessly, dropping extra words in is easy. The only difficulty is the sheer volume, and as I say, that's not something to address in the classroom. Yes, "learn a language in 2 days" is an exaggerration, and yes, it is only an introduction, but throwing words at students really is a critical mistake in teaching. 4 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 31 of 49 19 May 2011 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
To be fair, Michel Thomas (TM) is a protected trademark, so he can't credit him without risking infringing the trademark.
Very little, I would think. MT Mandarin is Not Very Good. It starts off with a long section on tones with weird colour mnemonics. The article linked in the original post claims that tones weren't explicitly taught, just incorporated into learning the words. Goodman also got caught up very early on in introducing words for their own sake, which isn't very MT at all. Noble has attempted to work out the governing principles behind MT's success based on the published material. Harold Goodman was taught by MT. But what MT thought he was doing isn't necessarily what he was doing. For example, in the Language Master, Thomas describes his use of mnemonics, citing "faire" in French: "it's a fair thing to do". But guess what? He teaches "fare" (Italian) and "hacer" (Spanish) just as quickly without mnemonics. Mnemonics were actually pretty inconsequential to what MT really did. [/QUOTE] 1 person has 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 32 of 49 19 May 2011 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
From the look of the sample materials, Synergy Spanish is doing pretty much the same thing in text form. And it's the way I'm trying to teach (although most of my current students are too advanced for it). Can I credit Thomas on my website? I wouldn't want to without hiring a lawyer, and I can't afford a lawyer. So his name doesn't appear anywhere on my website. (Which reminds me, I really need to finish that website.) Edited by Cainntear on 19 May 2011 at 8:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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