Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

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Cainntear
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby Cainntear » Tue Jun 27, 2017 10:30 pm

Zenman wrote:In my local Library we have good up to date of both Michel Thomas and Pimsleur programs. I haven't had any experience with either so I wanted to know if I was to borrow one of these which one is best worth my time. I'm learning Korean and German at the moment I think this information might be of importance.

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.

Yes, the accent's not perfect, but so what? The whole thing from start to finish is less than a week's intensive course, so it's really not going to stick.

I find parroting phrases pretty pointless when I don't know why they're of the form they are, and one of the good things with doing MT early is that you'll be able to understand the make-up of any phrases or sentences you learn from other sources later... including Pimsleur.

If you want to start with Pimsleur first, fine, but I would personally recommend doing the first set of CDs, then doing Thomas, then going back and finishing Pimsleur later. The thing I find frustrating about Pimsleur (and a lot of audio courses) is when everything's kind of easy, then one thing's difficult, and every time that one thing pops up it's still difficult... but the rest of the lesson is too easy to relisten to... Well, that shouldn't happen as often after completing Michel Thomas.

(As you may have noticed, I'm a bit of a fan.)
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby Seneca » Sun Jul 02, 2017 7:27 pm

Cainntear wrote:
Zenman wrote:In my local Library we have good up to date of both Michel Thomas and Pimsleur programs. I haven't had any experience with either so I wanted to know if I was to borrow one of these which one is best worth my time. I'm learning Korean and German at the moment I think this information might be of importance.

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.

Yes, the accent's not perfect, but so what? The whole thing from start to finish is less than a week's intensive course, so it's really not going to stick.

I find parroting phrases pretty pointless when I don't know why they're of the form they are, and one of the good things with doing MT early is that you'll be able to understand the make-up of any phrases or sentences you learn from other sources later... including Pimsleur.

If you want to start with Pimsleur first, fine, but I would personally recommend doing the first set of CDs, then doing Thomas, then going back and finishing Pimsleur later. The thing I find frustrating about Pimsleur (and a lot of audio courses) is when everything's kind of easy, then one thing's difficult, and every time that one thing pops up it's still difficult... but the rest of the lesson is too easy to relisten to... Well, that shouldn't happen as often after completing Michel Thomas.

(As you may have noticed, I'm a bit of a fan.)

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! :D
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jul 03, 2017 10:31 am

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! :D


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 Spanish
Definitely 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 Italian
Often 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 German
A 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 French
I 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.
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby leosmith » Mon Jul 03, 2017 7:40 pm

Here's how I'd rank the ones I've taken:
1) Russian (not as complete as it could be, but nicely done with native pronunciation)
2) French (more complete than Russian, nicely done but damaging pronunciation advice)
3) Japanese (not very complete, but quite nicely done)
4) Mandarin (not very complete, but not a bad course for a complete beginner)
5) Korean (ranked lowest due to incompleteness of only being a beginner course)
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jul 03, 2017 9:56 pm

leosmith wrote:Here's how I'd rank the ones I've taken:
1) Russian (not as complete as it could be, but nicely done with native pronunciation)
2) French (more complete than Russian, nicely done but damaging pronunciation advice)
3) Japanese (not very complete, but quite nicely done)
4) Mandarin (not very complete, but not a bad course for a complete beginner)
5) Korean (ranked lowest due to incompleteness of only being a beginner course)

Well as I've said before, I don't consider the courses not written by Thomas as MT courses at all as they really don't follow the same principles.

Ah general problem in the new courses is a tendency to have too many nouns. Often this involves shoe-horning fairly pointless vocabulary in a search for recognisable words -- in Russian and Polish, you keep buying newspapers and asking for passports; in Japanese, you kept drinking and buying beer, buying and eating sushi or ice-cream, and buying T-shirts; in Arabic, you eat a lot of falafel. One of the strengths of the original MT courses was the fact that language was general, and you could associate with something like "I want it, but I don't have it" on a very deep and personal level, whereas... I really don't imagine myself ever asking where I can buy icons. The Mandarin course was the worst for this. It dedicated several minutes to having us say we were English... American... English... American.... I'm neither -- stop telling me to say I am!

With regards specifically to the Russian, I've already commented on the issue of stressed syllables. I don't recall ever hearing much about the distinction between certain consonants (Ш vs Щ, for example) and in that sense the native accent is *too* native -- exaggeration of the salient features is required in order to ever notice them. (Polish was similar)
Furthermore, comparing Russian to German, both have a relatively free word order, and while Thomas was clear on this, he also made the neutral word order relatively clear throughout. Natasha Bershadski, however, started off by presenting the myth that word order is totally free, and then patiently prodding the students to "change the word order" in order to get them to produce the neutral word order. The students on the recording clearly didn't realise that there was a neutral word order, and were happily just producing multiple random orders on command. As a result, if you're not actively aware that that's what's happening, it looks like all the variations are OK, which further confuses. None of her mnemonics ever helped me at all.

Japanese bugged me for the teachers choice to present things as groups. Thomas specifically introduced things one at a time, and things that were similar were deliberately kept apart. But Helen Gilhooley's course introduced "patterns" -- i.e. three similar things at a time. For me, that led to a sort of confusion that I didn't experience in any of MT's own courses. She also kept breaking all the sentences down -- Thomas would reduce the support he gave as students became more confident, but she didn't. The student therefore never really needs to recall much about the sentence structure as the teacher is always giving you the difficult bit on a plate -- for example, cause and effect: A because B -> B "therefore" A. (And for that matter, why did she insist on saying "therefore", rather than "so", because that's a lot more natural and readily understandable to an English speaker -- that whole "therefore" thing really grated with me.

Mandarin.... it's probably the one I did least of (of the ones I actually did some of) as the whole colours, fingers, thumbs thing was just weird, and there was a heck of a lot of repetition. Yeah... he's English I'm English Are you American? Bored me very quickly.
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby Arnaud » Tue Jul 04, 2017 4:25 am

In fact I like MT courses when it's not MT who speaks ;)
I listened to the french version of them (except for russian and japanese which are only in english)
Russian is really good. Japanese, German, italian are good. I didn't like very much Spanish, the teacher is boring. Chinese is horrible, imho.
What I don't like in Pimsleur is the repetition from the end of the words/sentences...(I don't know how it's called in english, sorry)
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby Cainntear » Tue Jul 04, 2017 8:25 am

Arnaud wrote:What I don't like in Pimsleur is the repetition from the end of the words/sentences...(I don't know how it's called in english, sorry)

"Back-chaining".
It's been proven quite effective in teaching people how to say things that are too complicated for them to say, but my personal belief is that if you need to use back-chaining to teach it, you shouldn't be teaching it yet.
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby -JM- » Tue Jul 04, 2017 8:44 am

I finished them both in French and they are both great. Michel Thomas was definitely a genius in language teaching/learning. There is a documentary about him which you can watch on Youtube. From the first lesson, he gives you the confidence that you can speak, even create somewhat complex sentences. His method truly works when it comes to conjugating verbs, learning tenses etc. His course lacks some important language structures, which you can find it in Pimsleur. And Pimsleur lacks some of it too. They can be found in Coffee Break French.
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby Fortheo » Tue Jul 04, 2017 12:24 pm

If you're a fan of audio courses and you have the time, then I'd say use both. Each course's strength fills in some of the weaknesses of the other course. For example, you will find grammar explanations in Michel Thomas, but you won't be exposed to much vocabulary, and you might not be given the best pronunciation model; pimsleur on the other hand will give you more vocabulary (more, but obviously not all that you need) and it will be a native speaker that you shadow, so your pronunciation will improve as well.
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Re: Michel Thomas vs. Pimsleur

Postby Fortheo » Tue Jul 04, 2017 12:34 pm

Arnaud wrote:In fact I like MT courses when it's not MT who speaks ;)
I listened to the french version of them (except for russian and japanese which are only in english)
Russian is really good. Japanese, German, italian are good. I didn't like very much Spanish, the teacher is boring. Chinese is horrible, imho.
What I don't like in Pimsleur is the repetition from the end of the words/sentences...(I don't know how it's called in english, sorry)


I'm glad I'm not the only one. I definitely preferred MT Japanese and Russian over the French course. Although, I must admit that it's mostly because I didn't enjoy listening to Michel swish saliva around his mouth and smack his lips.
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