Spanish with Michel Thomas--Complete Course 8 CD Set [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Michel Thomas is almost as good a language teacher as he is a boaster, and that is saying a lot! Don't be put off by the boasting - this course really has a lot to offer, despite some serious flaws. I'll list the main strengths and drawbacks, as they seemed to me.

Strengths

1 Thomas concentrates on structures, especially the verbs in their various tenses. We really do learn very quickly how the language works.

2 He teaches these structures quite systematically, despite his apparently rambling style.

3. He explains things simply and clearly.

4. He involves us all the time - there is no passive listening.

5. And we really do (OK, I really do) remember what he has taught us.

Drawbacks

1. His Spanish accent is not good - especially the way he stretches out stressed vowels. Every native Spanish speaker I've heard makes them short and sharp. This course needs to be supplemented for pronunciation by recordings of native speakers. But this is not as big a problem as it might seem. Spanish pronunciation is not difficult - above all, the relationship between pronunciation and spelling is incomparably more simple and consistent than in English.

2. His teaching method consists entirely of getting us to translate sentences, which he provides, from English to Spanish. There is no practice in listening to Spanish, no conversation in Spanish, and indeed no opportunity to produce Spanish speech of one's own. But I find it much easier to go on to practice and engage in conversation and speech production now that I have Thomas's basic structures firmly in my mind.

3. The vocabulary we learn is very limited. Again, this needs to be supplemented from other sources - such as phrasebooks. But the phrasebooks are much more useful in the context of the structures we have learnt from Thomas.

4. Thomas teaches Latin American Spanish. This is not in itself a flaw, and he does mention some of the differences between this variety and that of most of Spain - eg in the pronunciation of the soft 'c'. But he omits to point out that in Spain (unlike Latin America), verbs have a second-person intimate form in the plural(with vosotros), parallel to the second-person intimate form in the singular (with tu). Thomas uses the 'ustedes' form for all situations in the plural, intimate as well as polite, without mentioning, let alone teaching, the 'vosotros' form.

5. He doesn't cover all the tenses and moods in this course - particularly the subjunctive, which is left for the 'Advanced' course that builds on this one, and is even better. (Avoid his 'Language Builder' course, though, which is difficult to use and adds little or nothing to this one.)

6. Finally, many people have been irritated or worse by the male student on the recordings, who is described by several reviewers in rather derogatory terms. In fact, he seems to me to be every bit as quick a learner of structures as the female student, though he unquestionably has problems with his pronunciation. (My guess is that he visualises the written word from Thomas's pronunciation, then tries to 'read' that written word in his mind, rather than directly copying the sounds that he has heard.) But this really need not and should not be allowed get in one's way.

All in all, then, this course is only a beginning to one's study of Spanish. However, I think it is an excellent beginning.

I picked up the first CD of the set for free at a Spanish homes exhibition in London a few months ago. I also purchased some other Spanish Audio language guides, and amongst all of them this is the one that way outclassed them all.

The mainstream approach of many of these beginner audio guides is to play repeatedly recorded situations of spanish speakers in various situations; catching a train, ordering food, finding your way around emergency situations, etc. However the great downfall of this approach is that, even if you do manage to memorise all of the sentences used during these situations, you are not left with a means to understand those speaking in reply to you, or adapting that language to express what you want in any foreseeable situation.

Michel's approach from the start seeks to try and make you construct your own sentences, instead of impassively listening to pre-recorded conversations. This 'fleshes out' the language in such a way that your understanding of sentence construction - and this is what the course concentrates on - is much more comprehensive, and the more you go over the material, the more you discover for yourself the inner mechanics of the language. This gives you the means to adapt your spanish speaking to the varying situations you will be exposed to if you go on holiday to spain (or any other spanish speaking country).

Highly recommended for its efficient, effective, and comprehensive approach to spanish learning.

By the end of the first CD I had completely thrown of my cynicism! I have tried a number of spanish courses, and books etc. but whilst retaining a few cod phrases and a limited ability to communicate in an emergency situation, I never before managed to get a grip or an understanding of the language and it's formations.... until I discovered this course. It's easy to look at the reviews on the back and think "no course could be that good" but unbelievably the method that Michel Thomas uses works! Thousands of spanish teachers in GCSE classes must be fearing for their jobs... learning a language shouldn't be this easy, and if it can be then why did I go through such torture at school?

Admittedly the 8 CDs can not teach you everything, and you will only become fluent in spanish through years of practice and immersion, but the confidence and understanding, combined with the ability to construct sentences and deconstruct what you hear is a better start than you will get anywhere else. I have since bought some spanish audio books and a couple of novels in spanish and, though the going is quite slow, the progression is SO satisfying!