The Michel Thomas Language Teaching Method

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"[Michel] had me speaking French and I learned it in a way I've never forgotten, and it was painless. A tremendous experience."

Woody Allen (as quoted in USA Today and Business Life)

That was how Woody Allen described the teaching methods of Michel Thomas, often hailed as "the world's greatest language teacher." His courses, teaching French, German, Spanish and Italian, aim to have you speaking confidently within eight hours.1 But just how good are his methods? When I was put down for a French language course, I aimed to find out whether they were effective or not. The first thing I found out was that Michel takes a very different approach to that of conventional learning.

A few ground rules


Michel introduces the course with what he calls "a few ground rules". They are:
Relax! Try to make yourself comfortable and release all tensions before playing the recordings.
Do not attempt to remember. You should not attempt to remember any specific words or phrases, or take notes. Michel aims to place the responsibility of learning with the teacher, not the pupil, so as to make the experience as easy as possible. However, you should -
Repeat the words and phrases. You may repeat them out loud, or in your head if you are in a public place.2 But it is essential that you try to construct the sentces in your head. It is through your own thought processes that you learn.
Take your own time. Obviously, sitting through the whole course for an eight-hour stretch would be tiresome. So it is permitted to stop from time to time, and to use the pause button whenever repeating things.
These slightly unorthodox rules made me feel that the whole thing was a bit of a con. But I was pleasntly surprised over the three days that I tried out the course.

The Course Itself


It starts with Michel Thomas laying down his "ground rules", before starting the course. It basically involves him teaching French to two students who have had no experience of it before. I found it amazing how much their French improves before the end of the course.

Michel Thomas' radically different method is this: he does not teach large chunks of related vocabulary: he breaks the langusge down its component parts and helps the students to assemble these "building blocks" into sentences that will be useful when participating in "real" conversations. I found these phrases extremely useful for all situations.

Michel teaches the students with the emphasis on learning, not mindless repitition or copying. When they get stuck, he helps them, but for the most part, his method seems to work very well. The students, who had no experience of French whatsoever, were talented liguists by the end of the course.

And as for me? Well, I can't really say it's improved my French that much, but my pronunciation and sentence construction are defintiely better than they were when I started the course.

At £60, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't intending to use this language a lot, but it could be a useful tool for someone who has never learned French before, but doesn't want a long, intensive course of language training.

Michel Thomas: A Short History


Michel Thomas spent most of his childhood in Germany and France. With the rise of Hitler, he was persecuted, and spent two years in French slave labour camps. He later escaped and joined the French Resistance, his mastery of languages enabling him to adopt many identites.

He survived capture, torture and interrogation by the Gestapo. Once France was liberated, he joined the US Army as an intelligence officer. He went on to liberate Dachau and interview surivors, driven by a personal mission to record the Holocaust and find out the fate of his family (he later discovered they had all died in Auschwitz).
Postwar, he moved to Los Angeles and set up a language institute. His experiences while in the Resistance, where he had learned to block out pain, made him aware of the fascinating potential of the human mind. He began work on a new method of language teaching. Over twenty-five years, he refined and developed it, until he was hailed as the world's greatest language teacher.

Now pupils at the Michel Thomas Language Institute, Beverly Hills, number in their thousands. He has taught languages to film stars, executives from leading companies, and "hopeless cases" who were told they would never speak a foreign language. He is a visionary who belives that "There is no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher."

(NOTE: I gleaned most of the information here from the information booklet which came with the course. Many thanks to the person(s) who researched and wrote it.)
1They consist of eight hour-long cassettes or CDs, priced at £60.2Or not. The choice is yours.

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