Customer Reviews

Michel Thomas Speak Spanish For Beginners: 10-CD Beginner's Program (Michel Thomas Series)

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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.

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).

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!

For me, the main plus about this course is the way it is taught. The way he gradually introduces new words and gets you to form your own sentences with them (basically the whole course involves him saying to the students "so how would you say ...?") really makes the language stick in your mind, as you're actually thinking about how to form the sentence instead of just learning it parrot-fashion. Even when i'm not listening to the CD's, i often find myself thinking about how i would say conversational phrases in Spanish.

Before these CD's, i tried a Spanish night-class for a while, where they taught it using the 'immersion' technique. Maybe it works for some people, but it did not work for me. The instructor standing at the front of the class talking Spanish and offering little or no explanation really wasn't helpful for me, and i found it very disheartening going to every class and being able to remember very little from the previous one.

Someone said in a previous review that the CD's had a lot of unnecessary 'lecturing' in them, but i found the explanations to be very helpful and totally necessary. Perhaps over time you would learn that in Spanish 'v' is pronounced like a 'b' or all English words ending in '-tion' end in '-cion' in Spanish, but surely having it explained beforehand makes learning it a lot quicker!

In the same review, it was also mentioned that at times it is hard to understand Michel Thomas. His English is very good and, personally, i had no trouble understanding him. Occasionally i had to rewind the recording because i had mis-heard what he had said, but that was it.

I am only part-way through the course, but i already feel confident that i could have a basic conversation with someone in Spanish. I'm looking forward to finishing this course and following up with the advanced course!

I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately I can't be completely enthusiastic about it. I'm beginning to think the perfect Spanish course hasn't been made yet.

First, the good points: the approach is very conversational, and doesn't feel overly repetitive. You will probably pick things up very quickly. The explanations and associations make building a vocabulary pretty easy. This is a stark contrast to the immersive approach taken by Rosetta Stone. For example, take a look at the online demo at their website. They show you pictures of 4 different people, and associate them with 4 words... but having no knowledge of Turkish, I have no idea what the distinctions are. Age? Gender? Family Relationship? Occupation? I have no clue, and felt immediately frustrated. Someone trying to learn a language from the beginning would probably feel likewise.

Also good was that the conversation topics seem natural and relevant. This is a contrast to the Pimsleur series, where many of the conversation topics seem overly narrow and less than useful. I'm not an engineer or a book editor, and spending an hour in a lesson speaking as if I were, doesn't feel like a good use of my time, when there's so much more I could be learning instead.

Those are the areas in which the Michel Thomas series excels compared to its competition. Unfortunately, there's the bad: first, Michel Thomas is not a native speaker. His pronunciation doesn't seem all that bad to me, but you can definitely tell he's not a native speaker, and I have to believe that this is not the best way to learn a new language. Even worse however, are the two students. Their pronunciation is absolutely terrible. Listening to them for such an extended period of time is painful and reinforces all the pronunciation bad habits we're trying to avoid. Listening to people who won't even try to roll their R's is a terrible way to try to learn Spanish. I'm worried that the more I listen to these CDs the worse my pronunciation will become; then again, I could listen to Pimsleur, except I'll never have any opportunity to converse about my fictional engineering exploits.
There's the dilemma.

This course is like being a fly on the wall of a room with an elderly instructor and a male and female student. You wait for the instructor to ask how to say something, pause playback, say it, then restart playback and see how you did when the other students respond and are either corrected or congratulated. The American female student is congratulated far more than corrected, and the opposite is true for the British male.

The British student does a fine job of stripping that erudite veneer off an otherwise intelligent-sounding Oxford accent. To say he's a slow learner is the understatement of the century. You'll find yourself rolling your eyes at his incessant mistakes. He stubbornly refuses to grasp many topics. Mr. Thomas can barely contain his exasperation at times during the recordings. The American girl, on the other hand, manages to grasp things at a respectable pace that keeps things moving along. It's funny because a few lessons in, you notice Mr. Thomas start to direct more of his questions toward the American girl for the sake of everyone's sanity. The only other odd thing about the recording is Mr. Thomas' issues with salivary management. I can just imagine him spitting as he talks.

I'm on Lesson 5 of 8 so far. Each lesson does a good job of creating a foundation for the later lessons. You get to learn new things while solidifying the earlier topics in your head. Each lesson seems to progress at a manageable pace.

I'm listening to this, then doing Rosetta Stone, and then language school in my attempt to gain fluency in Spanish.

UPDATE:
I'm now nearly done with the 7th of 8 lessons in the series. I continue to learn alot easily. Overall I still really like the course, but I must say the British guy REALLY detracts from the quality of it. He is painful to listen to as he eviscerates spanish pronunciation and laboriously stutters every answer. Thankfully, the recordings seem to focus on him less as time progresses. I'd suggest that Michel Thomas Inc. somehow find a way to re-record this course without someone so hopelessly inept to have to listen to. If it weren't for him, these recordings would get a very solid 5 stars.

Those who are new to the Spanish language could do far worse than to take up Michel Thomas's Speak Spanish for Beginners. Two features of this course place it above most others in the field. First, Michel Thomas employs an interactive approach consisting of a recording of his teaching the language to two novices, one somewhat more adept than the other. Listening to their attempts, mistakes, self-corrections, and Michel's commentary thereupon gives the learner the feeling of getting taught by Michel himself. Inherit to this method is much repetition, invaluable to the newcomer to any language.

The second unique aspect of Speak Spanish for Beginners is its breadth of grammatical coverage. For instance, by the end of the course, most of the Spanish verb tenses have been treated. Michel Thomas's method proves its worth in its handling of this subject which poses so much difficulty for native speakers of English, a language in which a verb has only a handful of different forms rather than dozens. The lucid, nontechnical explanations and ample opportunities for practice also bring the listener a long way toward mastery of basic Spanish grammar.

However, because Michel Thomas is attempting to discuss so much of the structure of the Spanish language (which, as he points out, cannot be guessed), his course is a little short on some practical material. For example, he equips the listener with only a very modest vocabulary, and he does not cover such essential topics as telling time, days of the week and months of the year, and numbers and colors. A true beginner will therefore require a supplemental course that will meet these deficiencies. Otherwise one will find oneself at the end of the course able to say very little and understand even less.

Another drawback of Speak Spanish for Beginners relates to its teaching of pronunciation. As has been pointed out by other reviewers, Michel Thomas was no native speaker of Spanish, and this becomes increasingly apparent as one gains experience with the language. Certainly he offers a good explanation of the basics, and one could use these alone and probably be understood. However, whether due to his desire for simplification or to a mere lack of familiarity with Spanish phonology, he omits some of the finer points. For instance, he teaches, almost as an article of faith, that Spanish "b" and "v" are pronounced like an English "b". This is true to some extent, but not when the "b" or "v" falls between two vowels, in which the sound is rather like a weakened "v". Similar observations apply to the Spanish "d" and to a few other sounds.

All in all, Speak Spanish for Beginners provides a very good start for those with little or no background in the language. Michel Thomas provides the listener a strong framework in his teaching of Spanish grammar, and his interactive method facilitates retention through its personal appeal and its abundant repetition. However, it is up to the learner to fill out this framework with the bricks and mortar of vocabulary and the interior furnishings of a polished pronunciation. Indeed, toward the former end, Michel Thomas himself urges the learner to read Spanish daily. To this recommendation could be added that of listening to Spanish radio, television, and movies, if not discoursing with native speakers. Also, more involved courses, such as FSI Spanish (available free through the Internet), can bridge the deficiencies left by Michel Thomas's. (Speak Spanish Advanced covers even more grammar but offers little additional vocabulary or guidance to pronunciation.) Only through such means can the independent learner hope to construct the sparkling edifice of true linguistic fluency.

I thoroughly enjoyed Michel Thomas's intro French cd's. The Spanish set was a huge disappointment. Unlike an earlier reviewer, I think there is an advantage to real students making real mistakes. We can learn from their mistakes - many of which we might have made ourselves. The annoying thing is that Michel Thomas makes his students repeat their responses 3,4 or even 5 times because they are not pronouncing the Spanish words with a French accent. The listener has to sit by and endure the tedium of the repitition and the lecturing about the students' mistakes. Most of this should have been edited out.Michel Thomas Speak Spanish For Beginners: 10-CD Beginner's Program (Michel Thomas Speak...) I played a bit of one of these cd's for some Costa Rican friends who were hysterical listening to the Michel's accent. Not a purchase I would recommend to others.

I have purchased over a dozen spanish language products, from the $300.00 that I spent on Rosetta Stone to numerous language CD's and computer products in the $20.00 to $100.00 range. Thomas' approach to language is the best value and by far the most effective and quickest method for learning a new language. Instead of just teaching words and phrases, he gives his students a clear undersanding of the language and sentence structure. It is actually difficult not to learn. Me gusta mucho Michel Thomas.

This is a nice set for the price. It comes in a nice black zippered case and has a small card with key words that correlate to the cd's. The only negative thing is that Michel Thomas has a german (I think) accent. I may have wanted to learn from a native speaker. All in all, I'd order them again.