romeo.alpha wrote:Random Review wrote:I have long been a fan of this guy, I did his early Greek course, which is basically Michel Thomas with a few minor improvements. That in itself is no small thing! Everyone else who tried to continue what MT was doing (whether Hodder & Stoughton, Harold Goodman, Paul Noble, etc) missed the point completely!
I'm not familiar with Harold Goodman, but I have to disagree with your take on Paul Noble. The way he set up the course is actually quite brilliant, and I've seen that approach applied in textbook courses as well (Kullu Tamam/Ahlan wa Sahlan for Egyptian Arabic for instance). What he does is look at what order to present a language in to make it easy. With French he starts with the past tense, because then you don't need to worry about different conjugation based on person or gender. Then he introduces it back in later. That's not a normal order that French is presented. Ahlan wa Sahlan does basically the same thing by having you work with daughter, son, paternal grandfather, uncle, mother and sister. But not brother, father, grandmother or aunt. Because the chosen relations all function the same way for a particular grammatical concept. It's a lot more thought than MT put into his course, simply working off cognates. It is also something Mihalis did really well with Arabic, just going with adjectives as verbs because it's a lot easier to work with than conjugating everything.
Cainntear wrote:This may seem like a small thing, but I think part of the effectiveness of Thomas was that he managed to do something most teachers pay lip-service to: teaching one thing at a time. If you teach vocabulary and grammar simultaneously, you're teaching two things. But you can't teach grammar without vocabulary for the grammar to act on.
This seems to be begging the question a bit, in that it accepts that Thomas actually was an effective teacher. Donovan Nagel does a pretty good takedown of that in
his review of Michel Thomas, and juxtaposing Woody Allen's endorsement of the method with the video of him unable to converse in French is quite damning. I'm really not convinced Michel Thomas is effective at anything more than making people think they can speak a language, and giving them the confidence boost to keep on learning.
Cainntear wrote:I think he's made a rod for his own back with the voting system.
If the Arabic crowd are abandoning it due to the disappointment of someone playing the system, that means the system's already unsustainable, and it will only get worse. On the commissioning page he says it costs €8000-15000 per course, and the subscriptions are pulling in $742 a month. Let's round that to €10k per course and imagine he gets the subscriber base up to €1000. It'll still take 10 months to get the money for each course. There's 20 languages on his voting map -- to do one course for each would take 16 years and 8 months, so if the voting patterns never changed, we'd expect to see Serbian in autumn of 2033.
OK, as he says, he'll get quicker with practice, but then again we have multiple courses per language, so any time gained in speeding up is still going to be time lost to other courses. Plus in the interim, there may well also be other commissions that interfere with his timetable.
Yeah, I think this ties in to his AMA on reddit, where he made a
comment I found really discouraging, namely that he hasn't even properly learned and doesn't speak the languages he's teaching anymore. It's also quite apparent in how much of a train wreck his French course is compared to how good his Arabic course was (admittedly I'm in a different position to judge his French, given I speak it leagues better than he does, while he is without a doubt far better at Arabic than I am). He's making a mistake Paul Noble didn't make, in branching out into too many languages. Paul Noble has his 4 languages he teaches, and has left it at that. Language Transfer would have been much better had he stuck to Spanish, Arabic, Greek and Turkish. And from discussions I've had with people about it and looking at the courses for the languages I know (French and German) I really think those are the only good courses he has to offer.
I didn't express myself well about Paul Noble. He's an interesting teacher in his own right. I just believe that he made a mistake in ditching sone of the things that annoy people on here but that ensure that people with no experience in language learning and those with low self-confidence can also keep up, such as a genuine student who makes mistakes. I don't mean to diss him and what he is doing; more power to his elbow.
Noble's looking at the order to present a language to make it easy is not original with him, it's what the best teachers have always done. Regarding
published courses, admittedly it's sadly far less common (I think that is a publishing industry problem rather than a problem with language teaching: in this regard people might like to compare the brilliance of their best professors at university with the insipid, monochrome approach of all the textbooks. Stephen Jay Gould had a brilliant essay about this back in the day).
I would add as an aside that it is similar with institutions. One of the banes of my life as an EFL teacher is having to follow course maps that present English in a stupid order. But the best teachers have have always presented things more intuitively and logically. Thomas also did it and it's a key part of what Language Transfer is doing. The X for reading series does it (in a logical order for reading that is). Margarita Madrigal did it, indeed also starting with the past tense for Romance languages (more on her later). Noble is not a lone voice in the wilderness.
You cast doubt on whether Thomas was a good teacher. I know from personal experience with his courses (at a time when I hadn't a clue how to learn a language) that he was. It's hard to convince people who already know how to learn languages of this, they mostly find it impossible to remember what it was really like and put themselves in that place when judging his products. At any rate Paul Noble also thinks so FWIW. He doesn't mention it now for obvious reasons, but back before he started his own series, he credited Thomas with opening his eyes to a better way of teaching. I don't mean that as a snide attack on Noble BTW, for some sad reason this lack of acknowledgement is par for the course in this area. Both Noble and LanguageTransfer have removed all past comments of theirs about their debt to Michel Thomas. Thomas in turn never mentions his very obvious debt to Margarita Madrigal. None of these people copied the other, they all have their own take, but they all owe massive intellectual debts to each other that they don't acknowledge.
Woody Allen... I don't know the context. I'm not particularly convinced by celebrity endorsements anyway. I base my favourable assessment of certain courses on my own experience. However if Woody Allen is like many people I've seen commenting on this thread, the mystery might be solved. You simply can't learn a language in a few days and no teacher on earth can give you that: not Thomas, not Noble and not Donovan Nagal. You still have to put the work in afterwards. If you're walking from London to Beijing, Thomas can give you a lift to Moscow in his car and give you a map to help you thereafter, but you still have a long way to walk the rest of the way yourself. In fact that's all any teacher or any course can do.
On the subject of Donovan Nagal, I am aware of him and think he is clearly a competent linguist and an excellent polyglot. If I can be permitted a quick and dirty classification of language learners into Newbies, intermediates and Pros when it comes to language learning, I as an intermediate find his blog interesting and useful; but in fact I didn't find him at all empowering when I was a Newbie (a period that lasts quite a long time I would say, learning how to learn a language is also a long process). In contrast, I wouldn't speak Spanish today if it weren't for Michel Thomas. It saddens me to see "takedowns" like that, because in my mind's eye, I see the people he is disempowering. Similarly people have shared similar stories of being empowered by LanguageTransfer with Mihali.
That's not me wedded to the approach of LanguageTransfer or Michel Thomas BTW, other people with very different approaches that inspired and empowered me include Khatzumoto of AJATT, Professor Argüelles, whoever it was that invented LR and wrote that very weird guide and Margarita Madrigal.
Obviously I am a fan of all the above mentioned names; but in fact I can even say the same about someone I fundamentally disagree with like Benny Lewis. I don't agree with "speak from day 1"; but the fact remains that his body of work as a whole is all about empowering people and that there are definitely people walking around today who speak a second language who wouldn't if not for his work. For this reason some of the hostility that comes his way is out of order. There is a difference between disagreeing with "speak from day 1" and claiming his new book series is a failure and needs to be redone (probably as much due to the publisher as him IMO) on the one hand and implying that the man knows nothing and his advice be should be avoided on the other.
The Richard Feynman's of this world are vanishingly rare: people who are both geniuses in a field and wonderful educators who empower people with their ability to educate. I say rare, Feynman is literally the only one I can actually think of. If I can return to my rough categorisation above Donovan absolutely has important and interesting things to say to the intermediates (and presumably also the pros); but when people like that do "take downs" of other people like Thomas who are empowering newbies, they do a lot of damage.
As far as LT's funding goes, the commissioning is a separate thing from the voting. I'm sorry to hear that the French course has problems. In fact he only claims to speak his two native languages (English and Cypriot Greek) and Spanish. The other courses (such as the Arabic and Swahilli courses) were all done with the help of native speakers. I don't know the ins and outs of the French course; but I do remember an odd comment he made (I think in spring 2016) about how the French course would be quick to make, because he could just base the structure of it on the Spanish course. This is certainly not the usual LT approach and if he did indeed do that (at a time when he was under a lot of emotional pressure), it would perhaps explain it.
You know Thomas, Madrigal, Noble... they all got rich on their courses... Benny is trying to do the same. Upsetting and unfair though I think blanket attacks on their work (as opposed to constructive criticism of specific points) definitely is, I could at least ascribe it to normal human jealousy. However Mihalis has massively undervalued his time and energy for years and has refused to monetise his courses out of a sincere desire to help ordinary people, and he
has helped people. He definitely makes mistakes (even his biggest fans acknowledge this) and of course as with anyone, his method can be improved and constructive criticism is completely valid; but the sustained blanket attacks on his work genuinely make me feel very sad. I just don't understand it.