“English is all French, badly pronounced”

Review: Michel Thomas For Beginners CD set

Contains: 10 CDs (two of them for review), 1 hour each

Affordability: best to borrow from a library if you can. 10 CD sets go for about $100 in stores, but can be bought in smaller packs off iTunes.

In looking for audio CDs to try for this project, the two that consistently kept popping up were Michel Thomas and Pimsleur, often with comparisons and the pros/cons of each.

While both have equally good reviews, I went with Michel Thomas – not because he taught French to celebrities (!) – but because I was intriuged by his method.

In the introduction to the CD set, Thomas states that he discourages his students from taking notes, or memorizing concepts; instead, those learning from him are told to relax and trust that the teacher will be responsible for their learning.

At the time, I was in school every day, juggling two spring courses and a part-time job, so I felt assured by Thomas’ promise that I’d learn French “without drill, without textbooks, without taking notes, and without homework, without any mental homework”.

In this sense, Michel Thomas was ideal for my situation; in fact, if you’re accustomed to the sort of lecture teaching style of post-secondary institutions, you’ll find Thomas’ format similar and quite familiar.

Effectiveness:

1. Learning

Thomas guarantees that students of his will have a practical and functional use of the French language after 10-12 hours of instruction. Surprisingly, he’s right! This is achieved in two ways:

a) Using your English vocabulary to expand your French vocabulary. Thomas begins the CD set with some fun facts on the similarities between English and French. Mainly, that almost 2 out of 3 words in english come from french and in most cases the difference between the two is merely a question of accent. As the French author Alexandre Dumas noted, “English is all French, badly pronounced”.

Vocabulary becomes vocabulaire; liberty, liberté. In this way, you’re easily able to express yourself in simple sentences immediately, and learning vocabularly becomes a matter of knowledge, not memorization.

b) Focusing on structural understanding, not situational learning. Many of the programs I came across in my research take a categorical approach to teaching French, in that you learn handy phrases to say in certain situations – like ordering food – without actually tackling how sentences are formed by how nouns, verbs, etc. fit together. This is all fine and dandy until you find yourself in a situation you weren’t prepped for and spoon fed conversational pieces.

Michel Thomas explains why French is spoken the way it is spoken - how it is structured so that you are able to form your own sentences through understanding, not memorization.

c) Also of note: The difficulty with this method is that it is so drastically different from what you may have been taught in school. As memories start coming back, you may have to mentally restrain yourself from asking why Thomas is teaching you differently than how you were previously taught.

Depending on your old French teacher, one of these differences might be learning to speak French as the French do, with all their shortcuts, conjunctions between words, and tricks of meaning, which Thomas introduces right from the start.

For instance, “that’s not what I mean”, is said “c’nest pas ce que je veux dire” (it isn’t what I want to say).

“Ca ne va pas” (it isn’t going) is pronounced as “san va pas” – contracting “ce” and “ne” like native speakers would– instead of “sa ne va pas”, which is how many beginners are taught to say it.

2. Performance/Operation

a) Pause for listener's response: The first few times Thomas asks “how would you say...”, a short buzzer sounds and a pause is left for the listener to think out their answer and respond outloud in time before Thomas gives the correct response.

After a few turns, it becomes obvious the pauses aren’t adjusted depending on the complexity of the response; even worse, pauses are eliminated completely after the first CD.

This significantly affects where and how you can use the Michel Thomas CDs, as I frequently had to quickly pause the lesson to give myself enough time to respond before the other two students on the CD or Thomas himself gave their answer.

This makes it difficult to listen to while exercising – unless you have a free hand – and nearly impossible (and dangerous!) while commuting if you're behind the wheel:

b) Lesson pace: Thomas’ speed of instruction is fairly relaxed and professor-esque; he sometimes takes the roundabout way of explaining things.

My main issue with the program, however, was the female student also recorded in the lessons who learned at a slower pace than me and the other male student.

My guess is that the producers wanted to accomodate both quick and moderate learning speeds, but I felt her difficultly at grasping concepts often slowed down the lessons.

c) iPod/mp3 capability: Like any other CD, you can download Michel Thomas onto your computer or iPod, with each CD having approximately 10 tracks.

The downside is that you may have to do some tweaking to make sure you listen to those tracks in order:

As you can see, the track titles aren’t consistent, and when downloading the CDs through iTunes, I lost the track numbers and had to put them in manually. The tracks are divided (loosely) by topic, and would benefit from beginning each one with “track __ of __”.

d) Review option: The beginners set I received from the library came with two review CDs that are extremely helpful for when you need to refresh your memory, or want to test yourself.

These are done at a more faster, drill-like pace, with Thomas asking “how would you say...”, with a pause for your response. The other two students and Thomas’ explanations are cut out for these CDs.

The bottom line:

Quality program with some operational setbacks. You will be speaking practical, conversational French by the end, and have a structural, not situational or memorizable understanding of the language.