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Review
"Ideal for any business traveller who needs to be able to get around confidently." (Sunday Business )
"Five minutes into the first CD, you already feel like you're winning." (Time Out )
"Michel Thomas is a precious find indeed." (The Guardian )
"Thomas makes it simple" (Sunday Times )
"Hugely inspiring" (Red )
"Michel's methods will teach you effectively and easily" (Daily Star )
"His logical, structured approach engages with your intellect." (The Telegraph Weekend )
"Five minutes into the first CD, you already feel like you're winning." (Time Out )
"Michel Thomas is a precious find indeed." (The Guardian )
"Thomas makes it simple" (Sunday Times )
"Hugely inspiring" (Red )
"Michel's methods will teach you effectively and easily" (Daily Star )
"His logical, structured approach engages with your intellect." (The Telegraph Weekend )
Product Description
**There is a newer version of this product available with visual learning**
The updated Total Spanish with the Michel Thomas Method may be found here.
Michel Thomas has taken the language-learning world by storm.
With no books, no memorising and no homework, Michel teaches the basic grammar of the language painlessly. Using the method he has perfected over the last 50 years, he now shares his secret with the world - and 'makes it simple' (Sunday Times).
In only a matter of hours, he gives you a comprehensive grasp of the structure of the language, enabling you to communicate with confidence. The present, future, conditional and past tenses are covered, and you are taught to think about the ideas that you are trying to communicate, rather than to translate words slavishly.
He points out the similarities of the vocabulary in English and Spanish and gives you the tools to guess the words you do not know, or think you do not know.
Join two students as they learn in real time. Become the third member of the class and experience the excitement of learning a language as if by magic!
The updated Total Spanish with the Michel Thomas Method may be found here.
Michel Thomas has taken the language-learning world by storm.
With no books, no memorising and no homework, Michel teaches the basic grammar of the language painlessly. Using the method he has perfected over the last 50 years, he now shares his secret with the world - and 'makes it simple' (Sunday Times).
In only a matter of hours, he gives you a comprehensive grasp of the structure of the language, enabling you to communicate with confidence. The present, future, conditional and past tenses are covered, and you are taught to think about the ideas that you are trying to communicate, rather than to translate words slavishly.
He points out the similarities of the vocabulary in English and Spanish and gives you the tools to guess the words you do not know, or think you do not know.
Join two students as they learn in real time. Become the third member of the class and experience the excitement of learning a language as if by magic!
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
55 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Far from perfect, but still excellent,
By Hebridean exile (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Spanish with Michel Thomas--Complete Course 8 CD Set (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.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent confidence building introduction; great technique.,
By Wake up Mr Jones! (North Yorkshire, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Spanish with Michel Thomas--Complete Course 8 CD Set (Audio CD)
This is an excellent, confidence building introduction to Spanish with a great teaching technique. There are many good reviews by other contributors to read but I like two in particular; one is entitled "Michel Thomas - Learning Through Understanding" and the other is "He should have ditched the English guy". I agree entirely with them both and do not wish to repeat what they already say very well but would only wish to emphasise two things:-
1. The male student is an absolute tin eared, hesitant, stammering buffoon who, four hours into the lesson, still can't get even the most basic pronunciation correct. A lot of time is wasted trying to get this berk to say things correctly and if you want to repeat the early lessons as a refresher you might well find it very frustrating waiting for him to get it right. It rather spoiled the course for me. The female student is entirely normal! 2. There is very little vocabulary so you will still need a phrase book and a dictionary.
94 of 99 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Useful but beware,
This review is from: Spanish with Michel Thomas--Complete Course 8 CD Set (Audio CD)
I have mixed feelings with regard to this course. In some ways it is absolutely excellent. Where it is particularly good is on underlining the importance of the right stresses in the language and also in the use of pronouns. If you don't know where to place 'lo' at the end of this course then you are a moron. The course really does give you a strong sense of self-confidence in your ability to construct your own phrases in the language. The value of this cannot be over-estimated. Whilst I certainly would recommend it I would say that before buying it you should bear in mind the following. Firstly this course will NOT make you fluent in the language and will give you only a very limited vocabulary. Michel seems almost allergic to nouns and adjectives so you will not learn many of those. Little attention is paid to genders which are an area of difficulty for many English people trying to learn foreign languages. I have no recollection of him saying why you use 'el' and 'la'- for me this wasn't a problem (I am fluent in French) but for some I suspect it might be. Not looking at genders means no attention was paid to adjective agreements- something which doesn't come naturally to English people. He also choses to ignore two tenses which are used widely in Spanish: the past historic and the subjunctive. For this reason I would recommend that you use this course in conjunction with another language cassette couse - I would recommend the excellent Routledge 'Colloquial Spanish' cassette course as the ideal supplement. This brings me to my second criticism of this course. Cutting corners is all very well but this shouldn't be at the expense of accuracy. Michel is very scepticle of verb tables but if he looked more closely at them he would realise that throughout his course the endings he gives for the 'tu' form of the imperative are actually incorrect (but he doesn't seem at home with the 'tu' forms which are used increasingly in Spanish). Native Spanish speakers also roll their 'r's much more than Michel does which reminds you of the value of accompanying this course with one giving you access to native speakers. Finally he has a tendency to oversimplify. He gives us the very useful information that English words which end in '-tion' will be the same in Spanish except with an '-cion' at the end and he leads us to believe there are only two exceptions to this ('traducion'= 'translation' and 'explicacion' = 'explanation). A brief flick through a dictionary allowed me to notice that whilst most '-tion' words did indeed follow this pattern there were actually quite a few exceptions. He then gives us the information that nouns ending in '-cion' will always become verbs ending in '-ar'. Again this is true in most cases but what about 'distribuir' or traducir'? So Michel needs to be just a little bit more nuanced in his statements because the student's confidence may crumble once they realise that some of the simplifications he makes are actually over-simplifications. So if using this course make sure you check the accuracy of everything you have learnt at the end. This doesn't undermine the usefulness of Michel's approach, it just means you must be realistic in your expectations.
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