Total Italian with the Michel Thomas Method (Michel Thomas Series) [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

This is a good course if you want to learn how to speak italian and actually have the confidence to try and speak it afterwards. However, the title is completely misleading as it's far from total. The familiar form is not covered at all, nor is 2nd and 3rd person plural (they and you plural). This is a huge part of the language completely omitted.

If you're not familiar with the method, it consists of two students being taught by the teacher in real time. They seem to have no knowledge of italian to start with so it does seem real. One problem with this, however, is that one of the students is quite slow both in speech and thought and after playing the CDs a few times it becomes very annoying. The student frequently doesn't understand, misunderstands or forgets things and when making a mistake halfway through a sentence goes back to the beginning and starts again, makes a different mistake and starts the sentence again. Both students have great difficulty with a couple of basic principles and repeatedly make the same mistakes over and over which really starts to grate. Michel Thomas has the patience of a saint but even he starts to get annoyed on the last 2 CDs. This is quite amusing the first time you hear it but ends up with him going into long rambling monologues that take up a lot of time in some places. A little bit of editing to remove some of the repetitive errors and long speeches would have made a big difference without ruining the real time effect.

The fact this is sold as a recorded medium that can be replayed is not utilised at all and a couple of principles are covered repeatedly when it would have been better to take advantage of our opportunity to replay things and cover a wider vocabulary instead or the forms that weren't covered. He does spend an inordinate amount of time on a small number of verbs as well as the future conditional tense (would, could and should) with much less time on past tenses.

The vocabulary CD seems to have been randomly added to this course inappropriately. It refers to the familiar form and the command tense and makes reference to "what you've already been taught in the course" when they are not covered at all. It spends a lot of time covering concepts and groups of words that are already covered in detail in the course but glosses over some changes to sentence structure and form and new vocabulary. I only listened to the first CD and was pretty depressed as it blew away a lot of my confidence.

I feel that all the advert hype and quotes from famous people (I'd love to know if they had lessons or actually learned from the CDs!) needed to be balanced a bit so that you really know what you're buying if you do get it as it's not cheap. I don't want you to think this is a completely negative review; languages have never been easy for me to learn and I'm usually pretty self conscious about showing my ineptitude in public but I found this gave me a lot of confidence, vocabulary CD excepted, and even an enthusiasm for the language and for trying to use what I've learned. I really enjoyed playing the CDs in the car as I have a long commute and can get through a complete CD in one journey.

Overall it is worth buying as long as you realise this won't suffice on it's own and it's biggest limitation is that, whilst it teaches you how to speak italian reasonably well, it does little to help you understand anyone who actually speaks back to you! It needs supplementation with a conventional textbook and some films/series on DVD - either English language ones with italian subtitles (you may find a few among your own collection) or italian with english subtitles. I've even bought a few italian DVDs with italian subtitles (the first one happened by mistake but was very useful) and am slowly getting a grasp of the language.Inspector Montalbano Vol. 4 - 2-DVD Set ( Il Commissario Montalbano ) ( Detective Montalbano (Inspector Montalbano Volume Four) )Come Into the Light ( Alla Luce del Sole ) ( By the Light of Day ) [ English subtitles ] [DVD]Cefalonia [DVD]Mid-August Lunch [DVD]The American [DVD]Sneakers [DVD] [1992]Takers [DVD] [2011]Blood Diamond [DVD]

I am a massive fan of the Michel Thomas method. I did French up to GCSE level at school, but other than that I have no language learning experience. I didn't enjoy learning French at school at all, but this method makes language learning enjoyable and exciting. This won't provide you with vast amounts of vocabulary, but it will give you the basic foundations of the language, which can easily be built upon. The time and hours just fly by when you do this course, it's just so enjoyable. I accept that other people may prefer other language learning tool, but for me, this is brilliant and can be used in conjunction with any other course. I would encourage everyone to learn using the Michel Thomas method, especially as they have now added the visual aspect to the course, to benefit all types of learners. In summary; for the money, this is a terrific course, and I would highly recommend everyone to try it!

This is almost identical to the original version, other than a few visual things added, so nothing new for people who have already used a previous version!

I like Michel Thomas' approach, it's one of the few ways to learn a language while driving or doing housework and not having to worry about books and writing. Also he is entertaining and having the other 2 students make it more interesting. However I would say that calling it "total italian" is a misnomer. It is a good start to learning the the language but by no means is it total. He really only covers the "I" form and "you" in the polite form, he touches on "we" but never on "you" familiar or "you" plural. There is a lot left out for a "total" italian course but if he renamed it "beginners" italian I would have no complaints. It's still good