Books : Spanish With Michel Thomas Short Course CD

Rating: - Excellent confidence building introduction; great technique.
This is an excellent, confidence building introduction to Spanish with a great teaching technique. There are two good header reviews by other contributors to read; one is entitled "Michel Thomas - Learning Through Understanding" (The most helpful favourable review) and the other is "He should have ditched the English guy" (The most helpful critical review). I agree entirely with them both and do not wish to repeat what they already say very well but would only wish to emphasise two things:-

1. The male student is an absolute tin eared, hesitant, stammering buffoon who, four hours into the lesson, still can't get even the most basic pronunciation correct. A lot of time is wasted trying to get this twit to say things correctly and if you want to repeat the early lessons as a refresher you might well find it very frustrating waiting for this clown to get it right. It rather spoiled the course for me. The female student is entirely normal!

2. There is very little vocabulary so you will still need a phrase book and a dictionary.

---

Rating: - Excellent if you're serious about learning Spanish
I've just completed both this and the advanced course and I think that they are both excellent and achieve very well what they set out to do.

I think that a lot of the criticism of the courses come from people who do not know before they buy them what Michel's methods are about.

These courses will -
- give you a solid grounding in the structure of the Spanish language
- teach American Spanish rather than Spanish Spanish if you get what I mean, though as far as I can tell the differences are mainly ones of pronunciation
- give you a great big boost of confidence after only a very short time; you will feel like you're learning really quickly.

The courses will not -
- give you Spanish that you can use for holidays. There are almost no nouns taught on this course and a limited number of verbs and other words. What it enables you to do is take the knowledge you gain from the course and apply it to new vocabulary. This means that you can then take your learning onto the specific things that you are interested in, rather than learning by rote numerous phrases that you will never use.
- give you the chance to hear native Spanish speakers talk. Having listened to American Spanish on tv programmes since doing the course, it isn't such a big deal, though I can't say the same for Spanish Spanish.

So if you're serious about learning the language and not just looking for a few phrases or the ability to read a menu then this could well be for you. But bear in mind before you buy them that you will need other reference material to take your studies further after you finish, whether it be lists of verbs or vocab or whether, as Michel suggests, you spend 10 minutes a day reading about subjects that interest you (in Spanish of course) and picking up the relevent vocab as you go along. But I'm sure that with any language course, you'd need to do this afterwards anyway.

As for those that can't get past the mouth sounds made by Michel sometimes when he speaks - you're letting a tiny thing make you miss out on a lot.

---

Rating: - Terrific

Absolutely terrific, the send of achievement gained after doing this is tremendous, I can now hold sensible conversations with a family member who studied at university in spain. I was thrilled to do this course, and am now doing the advanced one.

---

Rating: - Excellent for pronunciation
Just a quick note to cover a point that I think has not been /stressed/ (!) enough in the earlier reviews.

This CD will really help you get your pronunciation correct, which is absolutely vital. With other courses, you may not tell if you are putting the stresses in the right places and pronouncing the verb endings correctly and with enough clarity (e.g. "o" as in "tot" not as in "low" and differentiating clearly between "e" and "a" endings). With other courses you could think you can speak the language and then try it on a Spanish person and just get a "Qué?" in response.

With Michel Thomas, you can hear the other students make the mistakes you are making and Michel corrects them. Repeatedly. Repeatedly. Until. They. Get. It. and hence until you get it.

When I pronounced a word correctly and the rubbish student was still getting it wrong, I actually felt quite pleased with myself.

You may not learn that quickly with MT, but you make sure that the foundations are right.

---

Rating: - Buy this! You won't regret it!
I have tried for some time to learn Spanish but have found it hard combining it with home life and a busy job. I even took lessons from a spanish teacher living in England and, although I got on well, I never managed to get as far towards fluency as I would have liked.

I bought this package last week and have listened to in the car. The man is quite simply a GENIUS! I have learnt more in a week than I would ever have thought possible and am already composing simple sentences to email to my spanish friends.

This is without a doubt the best product for learning spanish that I have seen and I will definitely be purchasing the advanced course when I feel comfortable with the foundation materials