37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tiene que comprarlo ahora!!!, July 27, 2008
This review is from: Michel Thomas Speak Spanish For Beginners: 10-CD Beginner's Program (Michel Thomas Series) (Audio CD)
People either love the Michel Thomas method or hate it. Put me in the - I love Michel Thomas camp.
I used to live in El Paso,Texas across the river from Mexico. I was in close proximity to an abundance of Spanish speakers on both sides of the border. Yet, I only learned a few words. Couldn't conjugate verbs to save my life. When I'd ask some of my friends the reasons why they would say certain things in Spanish, they couldn't explain.
If I couldn't get a native speaker of Spanish to help me who could?
Enter Michel Thomas!
I know some people hold it against this program that he is not a native speaker. But he has a better grasp of making those hard grammar points easy than many natives of the languages he teaches, including English.
I'm a native Speaker of English born and raised in the USA, yet I don't think I'd be a very good teacher of the English language. I live in Chicago now and have had coworkers who are originally from Poland, Mexico, India, etc. ask me to explain certain grammatical points in English.
I fail miserably with my explaination. Usually I just tell them, "I have no idea, it just feels right to say it that way."
WIth Michel Thomas you'll learn another language but at the same time come away with a deeper understanding of your own language. I love the few moments in the beginners and Advanced courses where he expounds on the English language.
So please don't be distracted by the fact he is not a native speaker. If you are around Spanish speakers in your community or just watch Univision or telenovelas you should be fine. There's also a few programs that are great to use after this program to help in that aspect.
One of the things most people will complain about is the male student. He stutters alot, messes up frequently and mispronounces puede throughout the CD. You can hear Michel Thomas close to losing his temper.(I'm surprised the publishers didn't edit that out!) It's almost funny. Actually it is funny. I didn't find it distracting at all. In fact I found that my ego was lifted. I was learning faster than he was. I also found myself correcting him often. It made me feel that in this class of three(two students on the cd with Michel plus the listener) that I was an A+ student!
At the end of the Cd I wasn't fluent but it made me hungry for more. I immediately bought the Advanced CD!
Since I went through the Advanced I find that I can conjugate verbs at the drop of a hat without thinking too much. A plus is that there are two new students on the advanced and the male student is much improved. (sounds rather handsome actually.....) but that's for another review.
I admit that there wasn't alot of vocab taught but you can pick it up. In fact it will be that much easier to do after going through these CD's. Michel is a genius. One of the first words he teaches is the pronoun- IT.
I might not know the word for a certain item but i can just point to it and ask How much is it, Where is it, Can I buy it, Look at it, I want it, Do you want it? Did you get it? etc.etc. etc. and through a bit of conversation I will learn the word and without realizing it practice my conversation and listening skills.
Michel knew he couldn't teach all the vocab in the Spanish language, but just learning the word -IT- will open up so many possibilities.
Just listen to a toddler talk.
My son who is 2 will constantly say sentences such as the above if he doesn't know the word.
My son pointing to a paintbrush- "I want it."
ME- "Oh...you want the paintbrush"
My son- " Yes, I want the paintbrush."
Genius. Now he knows the word and how to put it into a sentence. Just like we students of MT will learn to do. We might not know all the words in a Spanish dictionary but MT will give us the tools to obtain it in a conversational manner.
Michel will teach you high frequency verbs I realize my son uses quite frequenly, I want, you want, I need, You need, etc. pretty much the basics for getting one's point across. My son doesn't want to learn when the next train arrives, he just wants to speak with his mommy and daddy. This course won't teach you touristy phrases but it will lay the foundation of communication!
We don't give children vocab lists in order to speak English. We talk to them. That's how they learn. We could all take a lesson from how kids learn and WHAT they learn. Why not with spanish? I suspect Michel did quite a bit of observing the way little children pick up languages with their parents and incorporated it into his program.
My recommendation is after this program buy the Advanced Spanish course. Your knowledge of the past tense will multiply tremendously.
After finishing the Basic and Advanced I went through Margarita Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish. It really complemented the MT Method. In fact I wonder if they knew each other because their explanations of the preterite/imperfect tense are identical.
After Madrigal I bought a download of Learning Spanish Like Crazy which I feel is great for prounciation practice after MT and is actually quite fun. Don't be put off by what appears to be the cult of LSLC , it actually is a good program so far. I'm almost done with LSLC Level 1 and am pleased with it and will be buying Level 2 soon.
I also started up Platiquemos Level 1 which is a more comprehensive Spanish Program. I tried it before attempting any of these other programs and immediately shut the book. I wasn't ready. It looked too difficult.
After Michel Thomas and Madrigal I am up for the challenge. I've gone through the first few units thus far and like what I see and am acutally enjoying it. MT, Madrigal and LSLC still left a few gaps in my Spanish knowledge which I hope Platiquemos can fill.
Nontheless Michel Thomas started the ball rolling and for that I will be forever grateful.
This has been a long review and I could have summed it up by basically saying- MIchel Thomas is the FIRST Spanish resource one should buy.
Anyone remember the bible story about the man who built their house on sand? Build your Spanish house on a rock and it will not fall. The MT method will be your rock.
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38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent 8-hour course, plus 2-CD review, June 12, 2007
This review is from: Michel Thomas Speak Spanish For Beginners: 10-CD Beginner's Program (Michel Thomas Series) (Audio CD)
This is the latest version of the Michel Thomas 8-Hour course, also known as "Foundation", "Beginner", or "Deluxe", plus it also includes the new 2-CD Beginner Review. The first 2 of the 8 CDs are the same as the 2-CD introductory course. This product does not include the 2-CD "Language Builder" though.
Michel Thomas used to charge $25,000 to teach celebrities to speak a new language in a 3-5 days (full time). This course is basically the first day of that course. So it tries to cram lots of sentence structure and verb forms into 8 hours, but doesn't give you many nouns except the easy ones which are similar to English.
Unlike other lessons on CD, this one is designed to feel like a real 3-student classroom. Two students won a competition to do a special version of his 3-day course (designed to be put onto CD), and the first day was recorded and edited. That helps keep the atmosphere relaxed, since you can laugh at the other two students making the same mistakes as you, and you can learn from their mistakes.
There is no taking notes, or workbooks, or conscious memorising involved. However you will need to do the lessons somewhere where you can speak out loud, and preferably you should be able to use the pause button every few seconds. You can try it without the pause button, but you may need to do the lesson more than once if you do it that way.
You will learn auxilliary verbs like "can", "should", "must", "need", "want", "would", "could", "would like", "have", "like", "feel like", etc. You will learn lots of verbs, and how to make them into present, past, future, and -ing tenses, and how to use them with other verbs. You will learn question words, like: what, when, where, why, at what time, and how. You will learn to make long sentences, with "but", "because", and "and". You will learn how to attach the pronouns to the verbs. You will learn about sentence order. You will learn a lot about pronounciation and stress (he is not a native speaker, Spanish is his 6th language, but that isn't a problem since he deliberately exagerates all the important pronounciation points - the "preeeeeeeeeeeesent tense"). And you will learn how to convert lots of English words into their similar Spanish counterparts. And some other random stuff.
I just finished this course (in 2 days), and I highly recommend it. It is designed to quickly give you confidence and basic grammar and vocabulary to start speaking in Spanish, starting from nothing, while keeping you relaxed and entertained about it. It is much more informal than Pimsleur. My version didn't have the 2 extra review CDs though, so I can't talk about them. It will take you longer than 10 hours to do this course, since you are expected to use the pause button while you think of the answers, but it won't take you more than a week if you set aside some time. It is entertaining enough to do in one or two long blocks.
[...]
After you have finished this course, you will want more. You can move on to either the 4/5 CD Advanced course, the 2-CD Language Builder, or the 5-CD vocabulary lesson. I recommend buying this along with the advanced course to get the Amazon discount. Unlike this course, the new vocabulary course doesn't have Michel Thomas himself, since he died shortly after making these courses.
If you want to learn other languages besides Spanish, this course is also available in French, Italian, German, and English-for-French-speakers). New versions in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, and Dutch are currently being developed, with the first three due out in September (although you can pre-order them now from the UK Amazon).
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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Goes great with other Spanish courses, July 14, 2007
This review is from: Michel Thomas Speak Spanish For Beginners: 10-CD Beginner's Program (Michel Thomas Series) (Audio CD)
I bought this Michael Thomas set at the same time I bought Mark Frobose's "Behind the Wheel Spanish", also from Amazon.com. These two courses compliment each other extremely well. Michel Thomas immediatly gets one really thinking in Spanish as he forces the learner to build longer and longer sentences as he builds a higher and higher foundation. It's a real challenge, but Michel makes it so much fun. There is some vocabulary too, but that is Mark Frobose's strong point.
"Behind the Wheel Spanish" is equally as great, but in a different way. The excellent instructor pounds common vocabulary and grammar into the learner by way of repetition (and native speakers), but repetition that is fun. One never knows that one is building a huge vocabulary and building a solid grammatical base to build on. Any kind of overlap is complimentary. "Behind the Wheel Spanish" gets down and dirty with learning the alphabet, numbers, time, the weather, and a million other daily ordinary actions and vocabulary words that everyone around the world uses in daily conversation. Of course there is conversation too, but that is Michel's strong point.
To illustrate how they work together: Early in the course, Michel Thomas will quickly have you asking of someone who speaks Spanish if they could confirm that a reservation in a restaurant was made and if not why; Early in his course, Mark Frobose (Behind the Wheel) deals with vocabulary that will help you to make sure the reservation is for the correct amount of people, the right day of the week and for the right time of night!
Buy them both for less than a hundred bucks, and you will have so much fun learning spanish from two true masters of language learning!
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