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The man behind the method... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Cammela Tetraglot Newbie Senegal Joined 4841 days ago 28 posts - 31 votes Speaks: French*, ItalianC2, Spanish, GermanB2 | Message 1 of 12 12 February 2011 at 8:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Behind every great method, there's a great man:
Berlitz, Cherès, Pimsleur or Michel Thomans... Who was the most gifted polyglot? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5799 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 12 12 February 2011 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Most people who're good at teaching aren't really as talented as you might think -- people with talent are usually exceptionally bad at explaining what they do. People without talent have to think about what they're doing, so they usually make better teachers.
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| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5235 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 3 of 12 12 February 2011 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Because we're interested in great methods, the question for me is not who was the most gifted polyglot, but who made the biggest contribution to making others polyglots.
Berlitz stumbled into the direct method and made a network of schools that is still educating hundreds of thousands of people a year over a hundred years later. And Charles Berlitz, who came later on, did a lot to popularize language learning and the idea that learning enough language to make the world accessible to you just about anywhere was within reach. As monolingual as the United States is, it would be far worse if it weren't for Berlitz. Chérel created a fun and exciting method (Assimil) for making a language come alive not just on records but off the printed page. As much as the humor and approach carries over from book to book, there's something it what Chérel started that lends itself to not just learning a language but starting to feel like you're working your way into its culture. This is especially invaluable with the Assimil series dedicated to capturing if not saving the regional languages of France. We don't know how long Breton, Occitan, Alsatian and others will last, but thanks to the template Chérel created, it will always be possible for a person of ordinary language talents and without academic training to pick up a bit the language and culture. Pimsleur was an academic who took a scientific approach to language training. Graduated Interval Recall isn't a language insight per se, but its application in the Pimsleur Method created a way to master a foundational set of phrases in a short period of time that arguably could form the basis for developing real communication skills. Pimsleur reminds that if our goal is to learn fast, it's not enough to study a lot, we have to study smart. And like Berlitz and Chérel, what he created seems to be extendable (with differing degrees of success) to a number of languages. Which brings us to... Michel Thomas created a fantastic method for learning a language. It's just not quite clear what it is. His patent tells you how to format and record a course such that someone listening to audio can actively participate in it. But you have to listen to what Thomas himself said on the recordings to figure out what goes into a course that's worth recording. The key phrases that stand out for me are "break a language into its component parts" and "what you understand, you don't forget." Some of the Michel Thomas Method courses created after his death capture this more than others. But part of that is because Thomas had a special genius for figuring out component parts of language that students could build on, presumably because that's how he broke down and remembered language himself. But now your recipe is to take a gifted teacher with a gift for mentally organizing and understanding languages and have him teach others to organize language in their minds the same way in a course format where a third party can act as as student... But to be fair, we don't know what a class taught by Maximilian Berlitz looked like, and while we do know what Chérel's first courses looked like, we know that his later courses were better. So time will tell what becomes of the Michel Thomas Method. At any rate, the importance of these four men for us is supreme: All four of them made invaluable contributions to increasing the number of people who see learning a language as being within their grasp, without which forums like this would not be possible. 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5381 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 4 of 12 12 February 2011 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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As far as the original question goes, I read somewhere that Michel Thomas spoke 9
languages. I don't know much background information about the others. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tmp011007 Diglot Senior Member Congo Joined 5857 days ago 199 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese | Message 5 of 12 13 February 2011 at 1:17am | IP Logged | ||
Alphonse Chérel, Michel Thomas and Paul Pimsleur what about Jacques Roston, Charles Duff, Margarita Madrigal (even Pierre Capretz) and... and... and...?... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mr_chinnery Senior Member England Joined 5545 days ago 202 posts - 297 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 6 of 12 13 February 2011 at 2:13am | IP Logged | ||
I must know what your definition of talent is, because this makes no sense to me. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5799 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 12 13 February 2011 at 7:34pm | IP Logged | ||
Probably because they had to think about things a lot themselves when they were learning. Is that talent? Edit: In fact, is it genuinely possibly to be "talented" in something as abstract as theoretical physics? Don't we usually use talent for things that are more of a "skill"? Edited by Cainntear on 13 February 2011 at 7:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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