Michel Thomas Advanced Italian (Cassette) [Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

The advanced course has the virtues of the eight-hour beginners' course but, unlike its predecessor, it tries to fit in too much and makes greater demands on the patience of the student sitting at home than the publicity would seem to indicate. Matters aren't helped by the fact that one of the two students being instructed on the recording clearly already knows a great deal of the stuff that is being taught, and this encourages too fast a pace in places. Of course, use of the pause button to give time for thought is an important part of using the materials, but Thomas was producing tenses and persons of verbs at such a furious pace that I often couldn't get the answer even with a long pause. I therefore found it helpful to have some Italian verb tables in front of me and, when mental indigestion proved too much, to refer to them from time to time.

Despite all this, there is no doubt in my mind that Thomas is definitely on to something and, provided you are prepared to listen to the recordings a number of times and not to give up, you will learn the basics of all the tenses that you are likely to need in Italian, including the subjunctive.

To sum up - excellent, but not for the faint-hearted!

Richard Batstone

I was wrong. I have used two sets of Michel Thomas tapes, this one (for a holiday in the Marche region, where we didn't meet many people who spoke english), and the Spanish set (for a holiday in the Sierra de Aracena in western Andalucia, where again there were very few english speakers).

In both cases, I was congratulated by both native speakers and by anglophones for my clear natural grasp of the language.

The downside of the approach is that you have very little vocabulary (you're basically dependent on loan words, which admittedly in a Romance language gives you a pretty good set, assuming you've got a good english vocabulary). Also there's no written component at all, so you have to learn that from scratch. Otherwise the course is at least as good as a year of evening classes - probably a bit better, because you can go through the course twice.

Of course, when you work out that a year's evening classes actually add up to maybe 18-20 hours, the 8 hours of the CDs begins to look less astounding.

Thomas' approach is to give you lots of practice in composing small sentences, gradually complicating the constituent structure of the sentences until you suddenly discover that you've just said a very long and complicated sentence. The exact example sentences he uses, by the way, appear to be identical on the differnet courses. I already speak German and French, but I'd be interested to know if that's true of them too.

He puts a lot of emphasis on getting little elements of stress and pronunciation correct, so that you are naturally more confident from the start. There's also a lot of stress on useful pronouns (like cosa/cosi in this case) which get you over worrying if you don't know the name of something.

The pedant in me picked up one nagging mistake (as far as I casn tell, and it's too late to correct now, since Thomas diend in Jan 2005): He did not appear to be aware of the distinction in English of will/shall (where if I will do something I want to do it but might not be able to, whereas something that shall happen is definitely going to happen, whether I want it to or not): all his talk about the future tense used the "will" form. Mind you, that's probably beyond a certain percentage of native speakers, too.

In the end, recommended.

I first heard of him while learning French at school, where our teacher mentioned a man who taught by replacing the standard institutional classroom setting with armchairs, carpets and potted plants. This may have been the demonstration that Thomas gave at Islington Sixth Form Centre (teaching French to six students who had already failed the language GSCEs they had taken), which was the subject of a BBC documentary shown in 1997.

A few years later I was listening to Radio 4's Front Row, where they were reviewing Michel Thomas' biography The Test of Courage, Christopher Robbins 1999. They were discussing the part where Thomas was being tortured by the Milice: as he was thinking so hard of creating a convincing alternative story, his torturers realized he wasn't feeling any pain, and Thomas then had to fake that too in order to survive.

The many experiences in his amazing life (a Polish Jew who escaped Nazi Germany and Les Milles concentration camp in Vichy France: the name 'Michel Thomas' was the last one given to him while he was working for the Résistance) helped him appreciate the power of our minds and to develop a method of teaching that does not produce the failures we often see in conventional teaching. He focused primarily on language acquisition because it is here that one can most clearly see development from zero to a level of fluency - he says that if you can speak one language you can speak another; however his method can be used for all subjects in the school curriculum.

Michel Thomas believed that the desire for learning is innate. He considered that traditional education had become a conspiracy between parents and the government to control children, and that conventional teaching crippled students, blocking the subconscious by creating tension.

Having read the biography, I obviously wanted to try his famous method. Michel Thomas was language teacher to the stars, having taught Doris Day, Francois Truffaut Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Emma Thompson and Eddie Izzard, among others, so meeting him in person would remain just a dream. Thomas died in January 2005.

Happily, he released his method on eight CDs. I have always been interested in Italian, and learned French and Latin at school. I felt therefore that the greatest challenge for me (and Thomas' method) would be to learn not a romance language, but German, I language I couldn't pronounce and disliked the sound of.

Michel Thomas originally released the eight-hour 'Complete Courses' on cassette and CD format in French, Italian, Spanish and German, copyright 2000. It must be noted that what is on the CDs is not his originally conceived method but his method compromised by the medium that must be used to commercially disseminate it.

That said, his method was an absolute joy. I found myself literally grinning with pleasure at my rapid progress. I am sceptical about 'miracle-methods' for language learning, and during my work as an English teacher (for adults) in Germany I have come across many teaching devices, and read many bizarre and complex-sounding theories. None approach the common-sense, clear, logical ideas used by Michel Thomas. It is impossible to misunderstand him. Nigel Levy, who produced and directed the BBC documentary about Thomas, said 'The way he teaches is just so fundamental'.

Disadvantages to the CD course:
It seems tautologous to say it, but all you have is what is given on the eight-hour course. If Thomas does not mention it, you cannot learn it from the CD. However, Thomas expanded his 'Complete Course' (8 CDs) with the 'Advanced' in 2004 (4 CDs) and the 'Language Builder' in 2001 (2 CDs) in the four languages. I recommend they be used in that order, not chronologically. This means that one has to go elsewhere to continue to expand vocabulary and hear and read the language produced by native speakers. The 'Advanced' course in German came out too late to be of use to me, but I have used it to develop my Italian.

The focus is, rightly, on speaking, but this can lead to problems when writing the language down. The 'Language Builder' course includes a 40-page booklet with most of the phrases to remedy this.

People wishing to expand their vocabulary could use the technique of a learning box with five compartments. Armed with a dictionary you write your own vocabulary cards and test yourself on them every night. If you get the words right you move them into the next compartment, if you get it wrong, put it back in the first compartment. This has the advantages of being tailored to your needs. Examples of word groups to learn might be: basic colours, numbers, days of the week, months of the year, public holidays, family members, common food, clothes, countries and nationalities, irregular past tenses - whatever you feel you need to know.

The Complete Course and Advanced CDs are constructed by having two students (one male, one female) learning from him. The user becomes the third in the group. Thomas typically asks, "So how would you say..." and the user should then press pause and think the answer out first. It is this action of thinking it out (as opposed to repeating, or copying) that in effect sews, or sows the language into the brain.

Having given the answer, the user then presses play, and one of the students gives their answer, and Thomas repeats (if correct) so that the last impression of the sentence pronunciation comes from the expert, or (if incorrect) he explains the step again.

The Complete Course took me about 11 hours to complete, which is eight hours plus the time I needed for pausing and thinking. I listened to it once or twice more for 100% consolidation. At the most generous estimate we can say it took me 30 hours. If you compared what I learnt in those 30 hours with a 90-minute 15-week course plus 30-minutes homework, I can almost guarantee the progress with Michel Thomas was far greater, and retention was far better, even without reviewing. It was so rewarding.

Initially Thomas takes care to relax the students. He does this by telling the students that the responsibility for their learning is his, not theirs. His philosophy is that nothing is so complicated that it cannot be broken down into pieces that everybody can understand.

He also delays launching straight into teaching and questioning by giving a little talk first. In order to find out all I can about his methods I have used all four of the available 'Complete Courses'. For the romance languages the initial introduction is very similar, for German a little different, but he starts by pointing out the 'broad common basis of familiarity' between English (whose vocabulary is basically 50% Germanic, 50% romance: French and Latin) and the target language. This serves not only to increase the confidence of the students, but also gives them an initial starting vocabulary not of zero, but of over 2000 words.

(For example, he points out that in French all but three of words ending in -ion (about 1'200 of them) are spelled the same and mean the same in both languages, and are feminine. Most words ending in -ant, -ent, -ance, -ence, -able, -ible are the same or similar. Words ending in -ary, in French end in -aire. Words ending in -ic or -ical in French end in -ique. Not to mention all the French words and phrases we have adopted: je ne sais quoi, savoir-faire, raison d'etre and so on.)

Having cracked open the language thus, he begins to teach core vocabulary, especially the use of modal and auxiliary verbs (while not using confusing grammatical terms). In the romance languages he focuses on the problematic placing of pronouns, and covers the present tenses, as well as the future, future conditional, the perfect and imperfect tenses as well as the imperative (this varies per language).

German grammar being more complex, Thomas was not able to get onto the past tense in the first eight-hour course, but covers how to distinguish detachable prefixes (e.g. aufhören, hör auf) from non-detachable (e.g. verstehen), the use of 'hin und her' as prefixes, word order after conjunctions like 'weil', 'wann' 'ob' etc, and when to use 'zu'.

His philosophy is that if the student can handle the verbs, everything else is just vocabulary. I believe this is right, for anyone can leave his course and teach themselves the numbers, colours, days of the week, months of the year, family, food, countries and nationalities from the dozens of shiny-but-ineffective books on the market.

Thomas spells the words he introduces, but in his method it is (controversially) not necessary to take notes or do homework. In fact I have seen how it actually hinders learning. Of course, it is the final aim of any teacher that the student will have the information in his head, rather than his textbook, however, Michel Thomas' idiosyncratic mnemonics really do keep the facts in your brain, minimizing the necessity to write anything down.

Summary:

Michel Thomas's method places the responsibility for the students' progress in the teacher's hands, thus preventing the student's possibility of failure and relieving him of that stress, as if his unspoken maxim were 'the student is never wrong'. Students are not allowed to apologize for mistakes, and at the first sign of nerves he slows down and repeats earlier steps.

There is no homework, no note taking, and no tests. In fact, his whole method uses continuous assessment: he cannot progress unless he is taking all the students with him.

He encourages the students to guess vocabulary and discourages the students from guessing structure ('giving into sound-waves' as he calls it - e.g. capisce and capisci sound very similar, but only one can be used to mean 'he understands'). Read more ›