Italian With Michel Thomas Short Course CD [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Also, idiosyncrasies in both his english and his italian pronunciation are a problem. Two examples: In english he pronounces "want" and "won't" the same when asking for translations- this produces "incorrect" answers from any student (including those on the tape) which he does not realise are his fault even though the same thing recurrs repeatedly (why did nobody tell him?). I found the long, slow, incorrect explanations that "want and won't are different in italian even though they are the same in english" irritating. In Italian he pronounces "Io" as one syllable Yo. It only ever sounds like this in very fast speech in italian.

The other problem is that you have to pause the cd to answer out loud (this is the constant method of instruction). This is a problem because it is very often not obvious whether MT has finished asking the question or not- it is very frustrating when the female student butts in straight away without giving you time to pause and think for yourself. With all the pausing required, MT's courses take much longer than the length of their recordings suggest (if you follow his instructions) and I was never sure where would be a good place to stop.
Neither of the students are really the ideal choice. In addition to the female student's bull in a china shop approach- really unhelpful in the "think- answer" method of MT- the male student makes very simple mistakes repeatedly. (That said, his pronunciation is often better than MT when he gets the words right!) It would be useful if the mistakes made by the students were not always quite so obvious- it is a waste of time listening to people giving very obvious wrong answers.

Impressed as I was at the time, however, I decided to continue.
The next stage, his "vocabulary builder" is, strangely, rote learning, parrot fashion. As well as being extremely boring, it is not very useful because the individual phrases are not explained in any detail- you don't know the meaning as you did in the 8 lesson course (the depth of understanding being one of its good points). The advanced course doesn't follow straight on from the 8 lesson course so you can't skip the vocab builder.

This was the point at which I changed to Pimsleur- which, in in my opinion is everything that MT should be! Pimsleur uses a similar method but in a much less haphazard fashion. All of the speakers are native. Pauses are on the cd, you learn to think and answer quickly and confidently in Italian and you also know exactly how long the lesson will last (each one is half and hour). There is a smooth progression from beginning to end. 5 lessons away from the end of Pimsleur (90 lessons in total), I have gone long way beyond what MT teaches (in all areas) and am a lot more comfortable using it. It gives you more vocab (including all the numbers you could ever want in part 1) than MT without ever resorting to rote learning. Like MT, all of the language learning is on the cd's, but Pimsleur does provide lessons in reading- so you know how to pronounce Italian from writing. In addition I found the grammar and word-order much less confusing. I think that completing part IA (15 lessons) of Pimsleur would be more useful than MT- although it does not cover as many verbs or tenses as MT, you would get by more easily in Italy and improvise more effectively with what you had.
I would say MT got me speaking Italian like an Austrian, Pimsleur like an Italian. I regret spending money on MT.

You can't buy comprehensive Pimsleur on Amazon UK and it is very expensive- quite a few public libraries have it though.