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 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

What other people have said is pretty much spot on, particularly the review by 'bunny'. I would like to clarify a few things.

The CDs cover fairly thoroughly 'basic' italian for a few verbs. Some might say a bit too thoroughly and repetitive. He covers dovere, mangiare, stare, essere, fare, potere, andare etc. Imho it's a what I would call longish 'basic' course. The method is teaching two people Italian. Now supposedly these people don't know anything about Italian, but I'm not completely convinced. I think that they have hired out an actor and actress with very clear speech and particular accents and been told a bit about pronouncing and basics (otherwise there would be way more mistakes). No matter it works, the desired effect is there (or perhaps they had a huge amount of editing and I'm wrong). The young woman has a very clear heading in the neutral direction American accent and the man received pronunciation (oh what coincidence). The reason I mention this is I think it is a minor shortcoming. These are not native speakers so although they have gone to great effort to get people with very clear diction, it's not necessarily how a native speaker would speak. The clear diction from the two students and Michel Thomas exaggerating his pronunciation (which may annoy people or sound absurd to others) does get you to pay attention and to think how you pronounce bits of words, but it is not like listening to Italian. It's more speaking.

I have Paul Noble Italian and I would say this contrasts. In that the pace is slow, there are natural breaks. The speaker is a native from the south. Paul Noble is better for listening to in the car or doing things. Michel Thomas the pace is much faster and occasional diversions and mistakes makes the pace completely different to do when doing something or driving. The 'mistakes' in Michel Thomas might annoy some people a bit whilst the slow steady pace of Paul Noble might annoy others (I have no problem whatsoever with Paul Noble). If one method is driving you crazy you can listen to the other for a bit!

As also said the familiar form tu isn't mentioned. However bizarre an omission this might be, it's not unforgivable unless this is literally the only Italian you've come across. I'm sure people can make it up with other materials. I would heavily recommend the collins easy learning italian grammar book (that's what I started off with and then got audio courses and books). The voi form doesn't seem to be covered, imho this isn't a huge deal, although I do think not having loro is a bit out of order. The vocabulary CDs are very odd. Whereas I've just said that the main bit isn't native speakers, the vocabulary CD is completely different. The vocabulary CD is voiced over by someone called Rose Lee Hayden and NOT Michel Thomas. The other people on it are two native speakers. I found the vocabulary CD very difficult to listen to because the English voice over by Rose Lee Hayden, who is clearly a very learned person on languages took her already very strong American accent and says things in a slightly aggressive and exaggerated way for the CD and made it hard to listen to (the other american accent on the main CDs is absolutely fine to listen to). Perhaps you disagree but you can find videos of her on the internet. You might as well almost have had an artificially generated voice with an american accent doing the voice over imho. By contrast the two native Italian speakers are great to listen to. I do agree that the vocabulary does seem to have been randomly tagged on, but there is a fair bit of genuinely useful stuff in here if you can actually put up with it. I would have been quite happy for someone like the student on the main CDs with the american accent to do the voice over for the vocab CD and one of the native speakers to have pretended to be a student on the main CDs - that I think would have been the best of both worlds. Suppose it depends what you expect, worth bearing in mind not all the other languages offered by Michel Thomas do have vocab CDs.

Some of the famous Michel Thomas diversions aren't that bad. There are a few what I regard as minor gems in there like where he explains where the future tense came about from. Some of these bits and pieces are actually really useful and things I hadn't picked up from other books.

The better value for money imho is Paul Noble. However I'd say they complement and contrast rather than being the 'same'. It is very easy to find the content of the Paul Noble one by searching for the pdfs on the website.