Self-study language: Michel Thomas method

Michel Thomas was a polyglot linguist, language teacher, and decorated war veteran who developed a language-teaching system known as theMichel Thomas Method. He claimed his method would allow students to become conversationally proficient after only a few days’ study, and his clients included diplomats, industrialists, and celebrities. Michel Thomas passed away in 2005, so the newer products that came on the market since then have been developed and recorded by some of Michel’s former students who were trained to teach and pass down his technique.

The Michel Thomas method is a cheaper alternative to Pimsleur, but that doesn’t mean the quality suffers in any way; it’s simply a different method. While it’s also an audio-only language learning resource, it differs from Pimsleur on a few important points.

Basically, the way the method works is that Michel (or the teacher teaching the language) and two students are recorded in a live lesson. Words and sentences and introduced with explanations, and within one hour you are expected to be able to construct simple phrases. You will learn the language with the students, hearing both their successes and their mistakes to keep you motivated and involved throughout the course.

Because actual students are involved in the recording, the pace of progress is realistic, and you almost feel as if you were in class with Michel and his students. Moreover, the students, at times, also ask for clarifications, for example concerning a grammatical concept or the pronunciation of a certain word, which well might be questions you have yourself in mind.

The method also tends to work in a more “inductive” manner (they let you “understand” new grammatical concepts through examples, rather than tell them to you right away). So you are sometimes given several drills around a certain sentence to make you understand how the language works, and slowly by slowly sentences are getting longer and more complicated based on what you have previously learned.

For example, in the Michel Thomas Spanish series, they will tell you that “Pablo is sick today” is “Pablo está enfermo hoy” in Spanish, and that “Pablo is a sick person” is “Pablo es enfermo”. So you are supposed to infer here the difference between the verb “está” and “es”, both meaning “to be”, through such examples (of course, you will have been exposed to these verbs and vocabulary prior to hearing those example sentences).

Another peculiarity of the Michel Thomas method is its high use of so-called “mnemonics”, or “memory-aides” to help you acquire and remember effectively newly-introduced vocabulary. Some examples can be downright silly, but that’s the point of a mnemonic, to come up with a silly association to make it stick in your long-term memory. To give you a simple example, in the Chinese series the teacher introduces the word for “where” in Chinese, which is nǎr (哪儿). The teacher then says the following sentence: “The poor man was ‘nǎrwhere’ to be found. Where is he now?” As you can see, through this menmonic, you will quickly remember that “nǎr” means “where” (or at least it’s supposed to help!).

Michel Thomas is, overall, a great method that I would not hesitate to recommend. I think the strength of the method lies in its progressive building up of ready-to-use vocabulary, sentences, and expressions. They really try to give you all the tools necessary to enable you to make your own sentences as soon as possible, and to be ready to actually talk to real people. You do not get the kind of useless sentence such as “the elephant is behind the ball”.

The use of mnemonics is also something I personally find useful. It might not be to everyone’s liking, but I find that it really does help with the memorization of vocabulary, which is often something many students of foreign languages struggle with. Lastly, since real students are involved in the recordings, the pace is realistic, and useful questions that a normal language learner might have when going through the process of learning a particular foreign language are often asked.

The most obvious bad side to the Michel Thomas method is its availability in only 12 different languages. So, for example, if you are looking into learning Hindi, you’ll have to unfortunately look somewhere else (I heard the Teach Yourself method for Hindi is particularly awesome, by the way).

Other than that, if you are a very fast learner or you have had prior exposure to the language you’re studying, you might feel that the pace of the method is a bit slow. As stated before, since real students are involved in the recordings and they themselves go through the method with the teacher, you are tied to their pace of learning. You might also not be that interested in actually listening to the attempts of the students at repeating and translating after the teacher.

Finally, just as with Pimsleur, because Michel Thomas is an audio-only method, you will definitely not be developing your reading and writing skills. However, it’s great for listening on your MP3 or while driving to work.

By sam gendreau

 http://www.lingholic.com/the-best-self-study-language-method-part-2/