Having started at least half a dozen different teach-yourself courses, I (Il Seffalice) am coming to the end of my Michel Thomas tapes. I find them brilliantly useful in building up confidence and understanding of the basic structure of the language, and very different in method and effect from the other courses.
The course is comprised of an extended lesson in which he teaches two other students, with you “sitting in”. His method uses no writing, learning by rote or attempts to memorise, but builds up knowledge bit by bit and using slight variations on the same core phrases to construct sentences, conjugate verbs, etc.
It isn't concerned with areas or themes as other courses are (i.e. there's no division into sections on travel, family, food, shopping, etc) and doesn't provide a huge amount of vocabulary, but there's no shortage of other places to find that sort of thing. Incidentally, the Usborne picture book series Your First Thousand Words in... may be for children but they're the best thing I've found for memorising vocabulary.
Michel Thomas himself has more interesting background than you might expect, at least in his early life. The rather hagiographic leaflet accompanying his course gives some brief biographical detail, and there is also a full biography, A Test of Courage published, though it seems there are some doubts over the veracity of some of the stries in it.
Having grown-up in Germany and France, he spent two years in French concentration and slave labour camps during World War II. Having escaped the camps, he fought for the French Resistance, during which time he was captured and interrogated, and tortured by the Gestapo.
The leaflet says, unnecessarily mysteriously, "his mastery of languages enabled him to adopt many identities (the last one being 'Michel Thomas')". Following French liberation he joined the US Army as an intelligence officer; he interrogated the Dachau camp executioner and interviewed survivors, and was later involved in operations uncovering war criminals.
Having moved to LA in 1947 he set up his language institute and developed his teaching method after which it all gets less fascinating.
Would you buy a used-language course from this man?
But of much fun is the list of celebrities he's helped with language learning and the non-alphabetical order in which he/the marketing bod at The Michel Thomas Language Centre has listed them. You can keep your Hello! spreads and Time Man of the Year awards, this is as valid a way to test the rank of celebrity as any other. I've repeated the list below. I wonder how Otto Preminger and Max von Sydow feel about being listed after Herb Alpert, or Diana Ross and Tony Curtis after Mrs George Harrison. Feel free to use the comment section to cut and paste your prefered rankings.
Mel Gibson, Emma Thompson, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Melanie Griffith, Eddie Izzard, Bob Dylan, Jean Marsh, Donald Sutherland, Mrs George Harrison, Anne Bancroft, Mel Brooks, Nastassja Kinski, Carl Reiner, Raquel Welch, Johnny carson, Julie Andrews, Isabelle Adjani, Candice Bergen, Barbara Hershey, Priscilla Presley, Loretta Swit, Tony Curtis, Diana Ross, Herb Alpert, Angie Dickinson, Lucille Ball, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Natalie Wood, Jayne Mansfield, Ann-Margaret, Yves Montand, Kim Novak, Otto Preminger, Max von Sydow, Peter Sellers, Francois Truffaut, Sophia Coppola.
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