Customer Reviews

French With Michel Thomas: The Language Teacher to Corporate America and Hollywood (8-CD Deluxe Edition) (English and French Edition)

5 star:		(55)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

After reading some of these reviews you may be expecting some kind of miracle. You will be disappointed. I give this course five stars, however, because it provides a great deal of information painlessly, in a short period of time.

After eight hours with Michel Thomas you will have a fairly solid command of the present tense and personal pronouns. Possesive pronouns are briefly touched upon, with others receiving even less attention or none at all. You will be able to speak in the future tense using aller: to go. "I am GOING TO buy it tomorrow." He briefly touches upon the real future tense - "I WILL buy it tomorrow" - though the coverage is lacking. His coverage of the past tense is bad, at best. He very briefly discusees the imperfect, but not the passe compose. Without getting into grammar, lets just say you'll need the latter in every day speach, i.e., "I SAW him yesterday."

Michel Thomas likes to say "Don't say it, think it" which happens to be the exact opposite philosophy of the Pimsleur program. With Pimsleur you learn how to speak without having to think out sentence structure, which is exactly how we speak our native tounges. This course is perfect for what it is, however. No other program, Pimsleur included, will have a total beginer speaking so much in so little time. If you are starting with Pimsleur or another program this course is definitely worth buying. After all, we all want to be able to speak the language we're trying to learn, and this will get you off the ground in a short period of time.

I must complain that little emphasis is placed on pronounciation. In fact, no one on the CD is a native speaker. I also have to add that anyone with any experience with the Romance languages - a few years of Spanish, a semester or two of Latin - could probably learn all the grammar taught in this course in about an hour. Don't expect all the complexities of the French language to be made clear after 8 hours. This course is a GREAT introduction, but an introduction is all it is.

I picked up this set of CD's to prepare for a week-long trip to Paris. It is a fun, painless way to get exposure to the language. It's a bit optimistic to think you'll speak French well after the course but it will give you an adequate grasp of the language, enough to muddle your way through. The great thing about this approach is that you'll learn the mechanics of the language and be able to use it somewhat creatively in real world situations. Drawbacks: you won't learn much vocabulary and at the end of the eight CD's, you'll wish there were more. Michel Thomas is on to a good thing and I hope he will publish future volumes. The Pimsleur Method (also available from Amazon) uses a similar method and offers three volumes - just shy of 50 CD's in all so if you have more time and cash, you might want to go this route. I did just fine in Paris. I traveled with a guy who had some high school French (so more vocabulary) and between the two of us, we were able to get by with a minimal resort to English.

I believe this 8 CD set is great if you meet each of the following requirements: 1) You have some foreign language experience. This is necessary because there are no pronunciation explanations, and there is a presumption that the listener will learn things as quickly as the students on the recording. If you have no French experience, you might have to listen to a CD several times before moving on. Also, future lessons do not always build on earlier lessons, so you must either replay CDs or practice your lessons with others. 2) You have large chunks of time to listen and focus on the CDs. I listened to these in my car on long freeway commutes, which worked well. I could not imagine simply listening in my home, where I might be easily distracted by phone calls, people, pets, etc. 3) You are planning to visit a French-speaking place soon. The tapes are very good at teaching French, but unless you plan to practice your lessons immediately after, it might all disappear from your head.
Overall, I believe his method is a good one. Michel Thomas focuses on teaching the "small" but extremely important words, and less focus on general vocabulary. After years of enduring high school French, I believe Michel Thomas' is the much better method for learning to get your point across in a foreign country.
Slight irritation with Mr. Thomas' crackly voice and idiosyncracies, strong irritation with one of the students towards the end of the tape. Overall, though, it gets the job done.

The foundation of language acquisition is input. Think babies listening for a year and more before they start to speak. This program, where you will hear more spoken english than french, is essentially an amusing cognitive exercise in short term memory. You will be able to manipulate the sentence structures and verb conjugations without too much effort if not with ease. The daunting french pronunciation will appear manageable and the teacher does not demand the perfection of it. There is enough repetition and overlap of structure to reinforce what you previously learned. You will think that you will be able to learn french, that your next trip need not be an exercise in linguistic fear and inhibition. Unfortunately these CDs are little more than the pep rally before the big game. Acquiring french is going to take much more input (listening/reading) and much more effort (repetition/meaningful conversation). The lessons you learn with Michel quickly fade, though they are inspiring and engaging enough when you are doing them. Be warned: if you don't want to spend eight hours in a very small room with a language learner whose inability to 'get it' will quickly drive you up one of the nearby walls, stay away from this course. Perhaps the program's editors want us to think we are superior learners. As you wait and wait some more for her to make her way through the grammatical minefield you will find yourself thinking of the additional lessons that might have been fit onto the CD. Mercifully her 'airtime' is reduced as the program progresses. French With Michel Thomas is entertaining but, unless you have the money to blow, you would do better to go with one of the longer programs. Bonne chance!

After attempting to learn French with numerous books and recordings Michel Thomas came to the rescue. This is the most relaxed, enjoyable and effective language method ever created. Michel teaches two students (on the recording) along with you and the results are amazing. You learn to think before you speak and it all makes sense in an amazingly short time. I listen to the CDs every night before I go to sleep. I hope he follows up these excellent CDs with a book to continue the learning experience.

After taking an adult course in French at the Walt Disney Studios and studying 52 lessons on tape with another series, I still didn't grasp the concept of French like Michel Thomas explains.

He uses mnemonic devices to help you remember words such as explaining where the root of the word originated. He also explains guidelines to go by and you can apply these rules 100% to other sentences. A light bulb went off for me when I understood the concepts. I've never been good at English grammar but have a very clear understanding of French sentence structure and how the verb conjugation works now...and he makes it easy and fun to learn!! You want to listen to more. I wish he had intermediate and advanced courses. I'd buy them in a second.

After listening to 2 CDs in French, I immediately ordered the German ones as well. It helps if people have had a course in pronunciation first before buying the CDs.

The only drawbacks are that the female student is REALLY annoying...she sounds like she smokes about 5 packs of cigs a day and has lost a huge amount of brain cells because of it....Also, he doesn't get into the past and future tense as much as I would have liked....BUT the program is so good and so worth it, you can overlook this after awhile.

Thank you Michel!! You saved me!!!

I have formally studied German for many years, so I was quite skeptical of learning a language with only a set of CDs. After completing Michel's course, I feel foolish for 'wasting' so many years studying German when it can be done so quickly! He uses knowledge of French that we don't know we already have, and continuously builds on it to form a comprehensive vocabulary (over a thousand words in the first hour), a solid understanding of the language structure and an understanding of how to use the language in social situations. It was all so effortless, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone seeking to learn to speak French. I've now started his Italian program, and will probably use his German one. C'est tres excellent, et je le recommanderais considérablement.

Michel Thomas' teaching style is certainly different. And if you're used to CDs that take you through a series of set situations - "in the restaurant", "in the hotel", "in the office" etc. - or CD-ROMs that include structured tutorials of French phrases and verbs, then you're in for a bit of a shock. Because, sounding a bit like a cantankerous and meandering grand-father who's had a couple too many glasses of wine, his style is to dispense with grammatical niceties, books, notes or even a logical sequence to his teaching, and to simply bully and cajole you into speaking conversational French properly.

Structured through questions and answers so that you're the invisible third student, sitting in there alongside a fairly competent chap and a pretty hopeless lady (bear with me, I didn't write the script), this is about as close to "one-to-one" tuition as you can get. And it works! Sure, you get annoyed with their faltering repetition but the trick he's using (which several other reviewers miss the whole point of) is that you end up second-guessing what they should say and, as a result, subconsciously drum into your brain the correct answer. Brilliant!

And, alongside this subtle trick, he uses several others to get you there as fast as possible... for example, he explains exactly why & how a huge number of English words are virtually the same in French, just pronounced differently, giving you an instant and relevant vocabulary of over 1,000 words. Don't kid yourself that it's a magic solution to speaking French but it's an extremely useful aid to fluency that a lot of other learning programmes, quite unbelievably, fail to explore and a perfect example of why his teaching method is so simple and effective.

No single course can make you fluent in French but if you know the basics and want a much better understanding of what's said to you and what you need to say to be understood then it's an invaluable teaching aid. As he would ask, "now how do you say, I want to know how he does it?".... not sure? Then this course is for you.

I can only praise this language tape course. Michel Thomas takes a completely simple, logical and gradual building-block approach to teaching the French language. I am an English teacher, fluent in Spanish, and have long believed language learning need not be long and ardous, nor mysterious. Mr. Thomas's method is revolutionary in its simplicity and effectiveness. I had previously made a few false starts in learning French and with this course I have really taken off. So, I can highly recommend this tape course and believe that bien tot, je vais parler tres bien la langue francais (any speling errors are due to the oral-conversational nature of the course).

I used this alongside French In Action and Pimsleur French. It does by far the best job of anything I've seen of turning the early learning experience into an active creative process. The fact that it does this from the very beginning is probably why it makes progress feels so rapid. Being able to creatively generate sentences out of a working knowledge of grammar and vocabulary is one of the biggest hurdles of beginning language learning, and this program encourages you to get over it very fast.

For people who are more familiar with the Pimsleur method, Michel Thomas may appear to have a contradictory approach, in that he insists that the listener THINK about what to say before saying it. But there's a reason why this works so well here, and why it creates a process very different from the endless over-think that Pimsleur probably sets out to remedy: the tutorials are always structured in such a way that what comes to mind is *always* cleverly directed, meaning that you will never be left stumped and floundering. And because you get to also learn from the mistakes of two other participants, as well as from Thomas' subtle encouragements, what you are left with is a tutoring situation at its best.

I'd recommend using this program with French In Action, the videos of which have been made freely available online. They seem to reinfoce each other well if you are just getting started. Good luck!