Seneca wrote:Cainntear wrote:The German MT is really very good. The Mandarin mentioned by rdearman isn't proper MT -- it was written by someone else after Thomas died, and it's a completely different thing (I couldn't bring myself to listen to the end of the first CD, but I've finished all but one of the courses MT himself recorded -- the German, ironically). The amount of material covered in such a short space of time is phenomenal, and it really sticks incredibly well.
I'd have to guess you are one of the few people around who can make this claim! Just purely to satisfy my curiosity, would you mind ranking the ones you completed (and including German if you think you got through enough to be fair)? And maybe the strengths/weaknesses of each if you are feeling generous!
It's difficult, because they're all so different and I went into each one with a very different background. MT was my introduction to Spanish, but I'd done 2 years of Italian and 5 years of French at high school, and also they are more different than you'd expect in certain ways...
But here goes....
Michel Thomas SpanishDefinitely his strongest course, and feels most "complete". One of the biggest complaints about this (aside from his accent) is the exaggerated stress, but I feel that there's nothing wrong with exaggerating at the very beginning, because beginners have a tendency to make mistakes with stress anyway, and this forced me to think very carefully about stress.
For me personally, the fact that he uses an "international" Spanish was a minor nuisance, because he teaches the "seseo" accent, with S,Z and C (when followed by I or E) pronounced as /s/, but I spent a lot of time with people from Madrid and Barcelona, and even lived for a while in the Basque Country, so for me S is /s/ and Z/C is /θ/. I also still struggle to use "vosotros" forms even 10 years on, because I didn't ever properly integrate that into my speech.
Michel Thomas ItalianOften described as the weakest of his languages, and I'd kind of agree... and yet I put it in second place. Why? Because it doesn't really have any specific weaknesses (aside from the heavy accent as noted in all courses). It feels a bit like a weaker brother to the Spanish course, which isn't to say it's a copy, because it reflects the differences in grammar and is it's own course. I suppose it's just a feeling, and may just be me. There's one annoying bit in it where he goes off on one about the difference between
want and
won't, because he mistakenly believes they're homophones in English (which is pretty crazy for a language teacher!) and confuses the hell out of the students.
Michel Thomas GermanA very, very solid course, but it fails to be complete because Thomas was so obsessed with verbs, he didn't spend any time covering the German declension system (and I assume the only reason that Hodder haven't released an extra course since his death is because they want a nice tidy set of courses that are available for all languages) -- and declension of nouns is a very big part of German. So it comes in third, because it's not complete.
However, what I really liked about it was that he wasn't afraid to talk about sound changes, and while he didn't teach hard-and-fast rules about how sounds had changed between English and Modern High German (if there are any rules, they must be pretty complicated), I found that he'd given me enough of a feel for what sounds
might change that when I see an unknown German word, my brain seems to be happy to evaluate that for me and I can identify a surprising number of German words that way. (Of course, having done some formal study of sound changes at university, and having already witnessed similar sound changes and letter equivalences in other languages, I was likely to catch onto this quicker than someone on their first foreign language.)
Michel Thomas FrenchI like this course. It's only in this course that Thomas starts telling a weird little story about monks deciding how to write the language. I assume it's made up, except that if it is, why hasn't he made similar stories for the other languages?
So why have I put it in last place?
Well, the thing that I found the biggest strength in the Spanish course was exaggerated stress, because learners often understress words. French is a
very weakly stressed language, and Thomas encourages understressing and underpronouncing as a way to cheat, saying it's easier to just "touch the L" of "le" and "la" so that you don't have to worry about gender... except if you do, you're just storing up problems for later, when you need to know gender to make pronouns and adjective agreement work.
It's kind of infuriating, because if it wasn't for that, I think it would probably be his best course.
The question of stress became much clearer to me when I started the Russian course that was recorded by someone else after his death. The teacher corrected students when they clearly stressed the wrong syllable... but when their stress was unclear, she let it pass. There were times when I could hear one of the students slightly stressing the wrong syllable, but the stress was so light that she didn't notice. The error went uncorrected and the student did it again and again, and when it finally
was corrected, he was confused. So Thomas bringing stress to the fore in the Spanish course was great, but hiding it in French was a huge mistake.