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31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent 8-hour course, plus 2-CD review, June 12, 2007
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.
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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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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Goes great with other Spanish courses, July 14, 2007
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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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This makes learning Spanish unbelievably easy!, April 12, 2007
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!
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