Books : Michel Thomas Foundation Course: Spanish (Michel Thomas Series)

Rating: - Spanish the easy way?
I've been wanting to learn Spanish for a long time. I'd bought a number of books, cassettes and CDs over the years and hadn't got much past the first few chapters or lessons. A couple of years ago the Michel Thomas language courses came to my attention and I bought both the Spanish and Italian 8 CD courses, which, until recently, and despite my best intentions, had been gathering dust on my bookshelf!

After meeting a Spanish relative of mine a month or so ago, I was galvanized into taking action, and finally went through the Spanish Course. The idea of learning the basics of a foreign language without doing any reading, writing or memorizing intrigued me, but after about the third CD I was longing to see the words I was learning in printed form.

The unique aspect of this course, compared with the others I have, is that in the recordings two English students, one male and one female, with little or no knowledge of Spanish, are learning the language along with you. Michel Thomas will introduce some new words and/or a point of grammar and then get you to translate a phrase into Spanish. You are meant to pause the CD, give the answer and then listen to the correct response from one of the students. Except that a lot of the time they get it wrong, and Michel Thomas has to repeat the same points he made earlier. This is fine the first few times, but becomes tedious and frustrating over the course of the 8 CDs when Michel Thomas is still going over the same ground again and again.

To be fair, the female student seems to be pretty sharp and seems to remember most of what is being taught. But the male student is quite hopeless most of the time, and really does struggle to find the right words and to pronounce them correctly. Which ultimately, in my opinion, proves to be too much of a distraction, and makes the whole learning experience far from exciting.

I think that if, instead of English students, native Spanish speakers had been used in the recordings, not only would the purchaser of this course be learning authentic Spanish pronunciation, but the same amount of material could have been contained on 4 CDs - or with 8 CDs a lot more of the language could have been taught.

On the CDs Michel Thomas claims he is teaching Standard Spanish, and in the early stages he makes a few references to Castilian (or Spanish Spanish) which he asserts is spoken in Madrid only. I have been reliably informed that Castilian is spoken throughout Spain, apart from Andalusia in the south, and that Michel Thomas's "quirky" pronunciation is definitely of South American origin. (I was puzzled that during the course no mention is made of 'vosotros', the plural form of 'tu', and the parts of the verbs that go with it. I have just read in my Oxford Spanish Dictionary that in Latin America, the Canary Islands, and part of Andalusia, 'ustedes' is used as the plural of both 'usted' and 'tu' - mystery solved!)

To conclude, I give the Michel Thomas Spanish Course five stars for kickstarting me into learning Spanish - I shall now be going through the other courses I have previously bought (and I'm buying other material too). I'm subtracting two stars for making me listen to that male student fumble his way through the lessons, and subtracting another star for teaching me the 'wrong' Spanish!

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Rating: - Great NOT the parrot way (w. by Una profesora española)
He leído muchas de las revisiones que se publican acá
En mi calidad de profesora puedo decir que me agrada la manera en la cual Michel Thomas hace el aprendizaje de mi lengua materna algo simplemente sencillo proporcionando confianza al alumno (para los profesores)
To the Spanish learners: I have read many of the opinions from some customers, I disagree with some of them as I have tried this course with my students as an additional material.
Even he is not a native speaker he does have a great methodology that can be definitely used to get confidence about the language. He uses very SIMPLE EXPLANATIONS to allow English speakers to understand and remember our Grammar and vocabulary.
If he would use a Spanish speaker instead OF 2 English speakers this course wouldn't have had the same impact I guess, as the point is to prove that an English speaker can achieve to speak some Spanish in hours... The question is would a Spanish speaker understand any of this guys used in the Michel Thomas records? Yes, Indeed.
What I do is to combine this course with the "all talk Spanish Linguaphone" and with some cd ROMs
If you are serious about learning castellan Spanish then I advise you to get the all talk as well.
Even no knowledge of the language is required; I have realized the course is more useful if you have learned Spanish before as in the case of my students when they received the tapes they automatically recognized that he doesn't speak like me.

However I consider this course irreplaceable, it is really a great course which I think any person interested in understand and not only repeat should get.
If you DO WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHY DO WE say? De nada, why do we say me llama? Oiga! Cómprelo ahora! Instead of just repeating it like a parrot then get this course I am sure it will be a GREAT help if you are just a bit patient!

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Rating: - OK for Emma Thompson 1:1 with MT but on CD with El Dimmo?...
La Thompson was up in front of the Spanish media for a press conference on some movie she'd been in with Antonio Banderas. Banderas and the Spanish media assumed he'd have to be Thompson's interpreter. But no: our Emma spoke for herself. When a journo asked how she'd got so good at Spanish all of a sudden she said, "Oh, I learned it over a weekend". She's a bright woman and Michel Thomas was her tutor. That's how she gets to endorse this course. So we know Thomas can cut it with a ready pupil, live and one-to-one.

These cds feature two "live" pupils. You are the third. One, a woman, is quick, receptive and most probably has some command of Italian or French. She needs enough correction from time to time to be interesting and illustrate a point. The tutoring proceeds at a sensible and satisfying rate when she is involved.

BUT - and despite the numerous times this has been mentioned before, it HAS to be repeated - the other pupil is a fellow of scream-inducing dimness. Well into cd3 he still can't get his mouth round the word "puedo". Listening to this guy struggling to say "muy" will have you clawing the walls. The tutorial frequently grinds to a halt for minutes on end whilst MT persists in his efforts to get this man to say "lo" rather than "low". At one point he even says "KIORA" rather than "A que hora?". It completely disrupts the flow and impedes the progress of the course.

I have just listened to cds 1-4 straight through - 5 hrs-worth, with repetitions where I was distracted enough [driving] to need to recap. The problem looms large that, however much one might progress oneself - and you definitely will - this chump is embalmed in digital dumbness. So repeated listening and speaking, as necessary with these cds as with a real live person, will have the effect of compounding your sense of frustration at the way the male student progresses at the rate of oozing concrete.

As for MT's method being revolutionary, unique, groundbreaking and so-forth: not so. I found his diversionary side-swipe at the standard definition of nouns, adjectives and verbs, in favour of his own [reasonable as it is], totally irrelevant and a waste of time. It adds precisely nothing to the course whilst grinding one of MT's ancient educational axes. [I have also read his biography]. I would expect any good language teacher in a conversation-based course to follow just the same format. I'd prefer them to be a native Spanish speaker, too. MT has the grammar off OK - after all it's very basic stuff, but hearing Spanish spoken as a mother tongue is ALBSOLUTELY irreplaceable. The principle of the course is sound: words build to phrases, phases to sentences, principles are introduced and developed through speaking, exactly as you learned your mother tongue.

I find it hard to recommend. If you went for a bottle of wine and a pizza twice a week with a Spaniard and swapped an hour's conversation in each other's language, you'd be far better off. Get "Talk To Me" [Auralog], which is lots of fun and brilliant for improving one's pronunciation and enunciation. Then try to get a listen to some of MT's course before you spend money on it.

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Rating: - Amazing!
I've been a good customer of Amazon over the last 3 - 4 years buying books, cd's, dvd's and recently even some gardening tools as well as this 8 CD boxset. I've never written a single review of anything I've ever purchased from here or other online retailers, but I have been so impressed with this item, I felt I had to.

I've always wanted to learn Spanish, but never found the time to attend evening classes, sometimes booking and paying for a course only for work to get in the way and I think learning a language by reading a book is very hard, but, to use a quote from the Sunday Times, Michel Thomas makes it easy.

I'm only up to CD 6 at the moment, but I've only had this 3 weeks and have been playing each CD at least a couple of times to reinforce things for me and I am amazed at how much I know in this short time already. Michel Thomas is a great teacher and the learning concept is novel but spot on. I can understand why he is so sought after. In addition, if you read about Michel's background you cannot have anything but the upmost respect and admiration for this guy, he is truly remarkable.

If you want to learn Spanish, quite frankly, as a starting point, you simply cannot do better.

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Rating: - Be warned
Be warned anyone who buys one of Michel Thomas' Spanish language courses, you are paying to listen to a poor quality recording of a heavily, mid-european, accented, non-native speaker of Spanish teach the language to an American lass and a fairly-hopeless English guy. On the plus side, the structure of the course does allow the user to quickly learn some useful verbs and from there create some present tense sentences, but against this, MTs pronounciation is inconsistent (what is going on with 'a' and 'ar') and therefore confusing, and as the course progresses (cds 7 and 8 )some of his other explanations are equally wooful. Not a fan.