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Why does Michel Thomas work? | ||
Tags: Michel Thomas | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4576 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 17 28 September 2012 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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After working through, _Spanish with Ease_'s passive wave, and halfway through the
active, I have been dissatisfied with my productive skills. Since Saturday last week, I have been working through Michel Thomas's Spanish Foundations course; I've covered the first 5 out of 8 CD's. If I make more than 1 mistake on a given track, I repeat the track, and I haven't had to repeat most tracks. There has been zero new vocabulary, and no unfamiliar grammar, but... Somehow this has seemed to unlock a lot of the passive knowledge that I have learned from Assimil. I had a 20 minute conversation in Spanish this morning, and it was better than any I have ever had before. I am very impressed. My Spanish productive skills are quite variable from day to day, and it is quite possible that I am just having a good day, but it certainly seems like MT increased my confidence and my ability to use what I know passively. I am certainly going to complete the MT advanced course also, where I'm sure I actually will review material with which I am very insecure (subjunctive especially). I'll continue Assimil also. I have been a teacher for 37 years, and I don't believe in "magical programs." Some are better than others, but instant results with no work isn't possible, in my experience. I realize that 99% of my Spanish skills at this point come from Assimil, but wow, what a difference with 5 hours of Michel Thomas! I remember a similar "breakthrough" when I started shadowing Assimil, but in some ways this is more satisfying. Perhaps I was at exactly the right point for MT now, but I wonder where my Spanish would be if I had started with MT. I actually owned MT before I started Assimil, but I didn't really give it a chance. I suppose MT is simply an excellent teacher, with a well designed curriculum, who happens to be filling in a few blanks in my understanding, or at least encouraging my risk taking. I definitely will do MT before I do Assimil if it is available for any language I learn in the future. steve Edited by sfuqua on 28 September 2012 at 7:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6408 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 17 28 September 2012 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Why not just do the active wave straight away or with a smaller delay than recommended?
Re: your future studies, I'd not jump to such conclusions right now. Spanish is wide-spread in the USA, so of course it's great if you get to practise it from the beginning. But if you start another language, even something common like French or German, you'll probably have to arrange your opportunities to practise them. Learning to understand first (Assimil passive wave) and then to produce speech (Assimil active wave) will be a perfectly legitimate solution, and you'd not be wasting your opportunities to speak German etc because they're not automatically present in your daily life. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4576 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 17 28 September 2012 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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I *think* for some reason I never developed the proper confidence speaking in Spanish. A
good language learner keeps trying even when he or she makes a lot of mistakes. I've been that way with other languages I've learned, but somehow with Spanish, I've been very chicken. Maybe Mr. Thomas's accent encouraged me to try to do better... steve 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4303 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 17 28 September 2012 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am not familiar with the "with ease" courses, but only with a couple "without toil" ones. In those at the beginning in the instructions, few as they are, one is advised to notice sentence structures. So it is on the user to do that, and extrapolate from there. Whereas MT and methods like Madrigal's Magic Key series, or for that matter a PMP verb workbook, or Synergy, or FSI, explicitly and in some depth cover buildup of verb tenses and complex constructions with modal verbs. That to me explains in large part their success in "unlocking" other known vocabulary.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4361 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 5 of 17 28 September 2012 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've never used Assimil or MT, but I discovered FSI's Basic Spanish when my passive and
writing skills were advanced and my speaking was intermediate. As soon as I started using the FSI audio, I experienced the same sort of magical-seeming improvement in oral production that you're getting from MT. Edited by Gala on 28 September 2012 at 11:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5343 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 17 28 September 2012 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | ||
You've changed your technique twice now, and each time, you've seen a big jump. I've occasionally seen similar results after trying something new. For example, my written French took a big jump after writing 3000–4000 words on lang-8. I think that if you've used a single course all the way up through A2, maybe you've learned all that it has to teach you for now. And even a small change in your study techniques may result in sudden improvements. So if speech production is your weakest skill right now, then it's definitely worth trying out MT, FSI drills or language exchanges on Skype. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4303 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 17 28 September 2012 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
This is an important observation, though learners in this forum stress using multiple courses and methods. I wonder if university language professors or academic linguists ever consider or study this issue instead of merely trying to incorporate various methods in more traditional university courses in which case the course is still a single course/method. How many university professors would be willing to advise their students to try out MT/FSI/whatever on their own in addition to the formal course materials? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4700 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 8 of 17 29 September 2012 at 12:52am | IP Logged | ||
I've done MT both before and after mainstream courses for different languages, and I don't think there is a correct or better order. When I did MT first (Italian) I had a better understanding of the structure of the language, and that made studying much easier. When I did MT after it helped unlock my speaking skills, like you've just pointed seen. But, I find that MT in isolation gets difficult with the second level. I've hit walls with Japanese (halfway through the first level) and Spanish (halfway through the second level). My new ideal would be to do MT I as a warm-up, do a course like Assimil, and then do MT 2 afterwards. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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