French

I learned french with the MT course – first the 8 hour beginner course, then the advanced. I didn't find MT's pronunciation a problem and I'd imagine that lots of peoplelearning a foreign language don't have a native speaker as a teacher.

Now that I'm reasonably fluent I've got to know lots of french teacher (or should that be teachers of french) who are not native speaker and who teach french in schools up to a high level.

Similarly, I have french friends who speak impeccable English but who will never, ever sound like they're a native English speaker. My view is that, unless you're bilingual or unspeakably gifted, it's almost impossible to master the accent. But that doesn't affect your level of fluency.

On the second point of memorisation: MT doesn't say there's no necessity to memorise stuff, rather that it is the responsibility of the teacher to make sure you remember rather than that of the student.

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May 29, 2015
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by: ed

Here is the straight cut and paste from the michelthomas.com website homepage. The second statement on the website after 'The Michel Thomas Method: How it Works'

"No books. No writing. No memorising. Just confidence – fast."

One of his big sales pitch points is that there is no memorisation.

Another sales pitch is that there are no books. i.e no reading.

I notice that they now "New Visual Learning" which involves ... er ... reading. Reading on a computer is still reading ... so it is very much a .... book.

I applaud the move because I believe in a multimedia and multimode approach to learning. The more senses one engages the more effective is learning.

It does deflate their claims somewhat.

I am big fan of MT's techniques for 'putting everything together' and teaching big long sentences through the use of conjunctions. But some of the claims are exaggerated.

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