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Comparison of Michel Thomas and Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| JCF Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6416 days ago 18 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 1 of 8 24 May 2010 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have used Michel Thomas courses in the past to help me get aquainted with the language. I like the courses a lot (except perhaps Michel's voice) and I think that I learn well when I use them. Now there are the new "Michel Thomas Method" editions (Russian, Greek, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, etc...), and I am wondering if they are as good as the originals. I would like to take a look at the Russian one, but I wanted to get some opinions first.
Peter Edited by JCF on 24 May 2010 at 11:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| stout Senior Member Ireland Joined 5374 days ago 108 posts - 140 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 2 of 8 24 May 2010 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had studied French with the MT course and I confess that the gruff voice of MT
irritates me to no end. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 8 25 May 2010 at 10:19am | IP Logged | ||
They're nowhere near as good, because the new teachers really didn't understand what Thomas was doing. There used to be an official MT "fan forum" and I posted a few observations on how the Russian course differed from the MT way of doing things. The official response came back to the effect of "I've been teaching for X years and I know what my students like". The Russian, Arabic and Japanese courses are peppered with random words purely on the grounds that they have been borrowed into English or were borrowed from English, and these just get in the way. Complain about it and the response is "Thomas used cognates too". Yes, but only when it fitted with the course philosophy. Most new courses are littered with meaningless "mnemonics" too. Complain? "Michel Thomas used mnemonics too." Yes, but these courses introduce as many in 1 CD as Thomas used in an entire course. Also, Thomas didn't use mnemonics the same way -- he used them as cues, as a a way to prompt the student to say the right thing. The new teachers get the student to recall the mnemonic then the term. Very different. Finally, with Thomas, what you hear is what happened. The only things edited out are when they went for coffee breaks, meal breaks, or stopped for the night. Not so with the new courses. There's lots of teaching edited out because it was considered too boring and repetitive. They failed to recognise Thomas's most simple principle -- if the student is learning fast enough, you aren't teaching right. Edit: You can check out the first hour of every course for free at http://www.michelthomas.co.uk/soundclips.htm Edited by Cainntear on 25 May 2010 at 10:22am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Silvance5 Groupie United States Joined 5497 days ago 86 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, French | Message 4 of 8 27 May 2010 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's a shame too. His method is, for me, the best method to learn a language from scratch. I learned more in my 8 hours of German with him than I learned in an entire year of classroom German classes. I hope to implement some of his techniques in my own teaching.
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| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5450 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 5 of 8 30 May 2010 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think Cainntear points to the biggest weakness of the new courses - they aren't live. Michel Thomas believed that it was dangerous to just throw out material and expect the students to learn. Instead, it was essential that the teacher make sure the students learn. With the Michel Thomas courses, as long as you're at least as smart as the slower student, you can learn everything essential in the course. You know that, because the slower student did! With the Method courses, however much they try to make the same things happen in the classroom that happened in the Michel Thomas classroom, they're missing the essential ingredient: the focus is on the material covered and explanations used, not on the fact that you can learn this much in this amount of time and you know it because the model students did.
I found the Portuguese course to be pretty good. And the 1 hour sample Greek course was nice. However, while they're good courses, I did have to pause more often, or even replay bits every now and again for the Portuguese, because the focus was on what was being taught, not whether the student was learning. In short, not a bad course, but not a Michel Thomas course. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jpazzz Groupie United States Joined 5048 days ago 54 posts - 76 votes Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 8 02 February 2011 at 9:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello, This thread seems to have ended some time ago, but I thought I'd add a dissenting note.
I used the original MT German Foundation course some years ago as a part of my effort to get my German back up to some kind of usefulness after having not spoken it for nearly forty years. I found the course method okay but disliked MT's voice and manner. To me he was more than borderline unpleasant...I wonder what he would have sounded like when he was younger. In contrast, I find the new MT Method Russian courses to be a delight. Natasha Bershadski's manner is pleasant. She's not afraid to laugh. Her accent when speaking English is wonderful, i.e., she sounds like the German actress Barbara Sukowa when the latter speaks English. I believe Bershadski follows MT's principles as spelt out in Jonathan Solity's book, The Learning Revolution. One of the things that MT did very well indeed was choosing what to teach. Anyone who's spent time in a classroom knows that there is limited time in any course/session/semester, and that one must choose what to teach in the available time. MT understood how to break language down into achievable bits, and hence make a foreign language understandable and give a student a sense of accomplishment. I believe that Bershadski does the same thing with the rather different language which she teaches. Russian is an inflected language with far fewer cognates and near cognates than are found in German where word placement is vital (which is not, of course, the case in an inflected language). In Bershadski's courses there is, in fact, the same stress on verb and pronoun usage that is found in MT's original courses, but they operate a bit differently than in, say, German or Spanish; and I think her work is truly excellent and definitely follows MT's method/practice. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 8 02 February 2011 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dr. Solity is an educational psychologist, not a linguist. To me it seems like what he saw in Thomas's work was ideas that he had already decided upon as important in education.
The book is useful in that it puts the general theory of Thomas's general technique in a wider perspective, but without the insight into language, there's a lot missing. He barely touches on Thomas's choice of material. From a linguistic perspective, Thomas's courses are characterised by low lexical density when most courses have a high lexical density (the prompts in the Russian course has a much higher lexical density than Thomas's German course). Cognates are a red herring. As I remember it, every cognate in the Foundation German course exists in a non-cognate form in the Spanish, Italian and French courses. I take this to mean that the cognates in German were incidental, and the cognates in the Romance courses were like a "free gift" of sorts. In German, as you say, the cognates aren't that close to English anyway, and I think Thomas's goal wasn't to help you learn the words themselves, but to help you with future guessing. German and Russian are far more similar in teaching than German and Spanish, presenting very similar problems to an English speaker, (notably the case system) so I don't agree with the idea that "different language" justifies the difference in the course 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jpazzz Groupie United States Joined 5048 days ago 54 posts - 76 votes Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 8 03 February 2011 at 4:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello Pentaglot, You raise some very interesting points. I was aware of Dr. Solity's credentials in Psychology rather than languages. That, however, seemed to fit in with the fact that much (most?) of MT's educational background was, I believe, in Psychology rather than languages plus the apparent idea (apparent to me at any rate) that MT felt language teaching had gotten it wrong.
Not sure what you mean by saying that "Cognates are a red herring." I mentioned them mostly because everyone who writes about MT seems to like to refer to them. This next is going off the track a bit, but it seems to me that one of the problems of education is that people teach the subjects that they teach because they enjoyed studying them themselves...and that almost always means that the subject came easily to that person. A frequent (but not universal) byproduct of that is that the teacher cannot understand the problems that a student with little ability and little interest has in attempting to learn the subject. I have a Ph.D. in literature and spent forty years as a college and university Prof. To begin with, I believe I was an enthusiastic, but only moderately decent teacher because I didn't understand what I've just talked about above. Later, as I mellowed and got cleverer, I hope that I improved. Be that as it may, in the course of my career, sometimes by simply walking down a hallway and glancing into classrooms and lecture halls, I formed the opinion that most teachers, no matter how well prepared, were simply not very interesting. This would seem to jibe with MT's opinions. Anyway, I suspect we'll just have to disagree about Barshadski's courses. They seem to me to follow closely what I understand to be MT's methods. She herself is an energetic and engaging teacher. And I really like what she's done. Cheers, John P 1 person has voted this message useful |
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