hagestolz wrote:I decided to start off with the Michel Thomas method, where a native teacher teaches two beginner students, and you, the learner become the third student. No books, no notes, just listen, repeat and then manipulate the structures to make short sentences according to the English cues.
I actually find the method very effective...
I agree. Of the various courses I've used now, I believe that Michel Thomas is the best one for absolute beginners and is the first I'd recommend. Nothing else I've tried beats it for introducing a good amount of useful language, in a short time, at a sensible pace, in a way that it sticks.
My experiences with other courses:
- Language Transfer is of a similar style to MT and goes much deeper into grammar, but I found it to just be too much to take in and forgot much of it afterwards. If you learned it all you'd have an excellent foundation, but doing so is tough and requires working through it slowly and/or several times. A transcript is available but its quality isn't great: large parts are missing accent marks, or even worse, have Greek written in Latin script. Overall, good for a serious learner but maybe not as a first course.
- Assimil seems slow at first but gets very hard very quickly, even for a post-beginner who's worked through other resources on this list. It would be extremely tough for an absolute beginner.
- DuoLingo as always is more useful for extra practice than as a main course.
- GreekPod101 has some great beginner and low-intermediate content as well as some more advanced lessons, but on the whole the site isn't organised well and doesn't provide a single clear path to follow.
- I've not tried the other usual suspects (Colloquial, Teach Yourself, etc.), but they seem to have mixed reviews.
- Kypros is worth a look, but again seems more suited to complementing other resources.