An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. The Michel Thomas Method TOTAL French language course is for beginners or upper beginners. This 12-hour language course builds on your French language skills in manageable steps by making you work out the answers for yourself.

Michel Thomas (born Moniek Kroskof, February 3, 1914 – January 8, 2005) was a polyglotlinguist, and decorated war veteran. He survived imprisonment in several different Nazi concentration camps after serving in the Maquis of the French Resistance and worked with the U.S. ArmyCounter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After the war, Thomas emigrated to the United States, where he developed a language-teaching system known as the 'Michel Thomas method'. In 2004 he was awarded the Silver Star by the U.S. Army.

Life[edit]

Childhood[edit]

Thomas was born in Łódź, Poland, to a wealthy Jewish family who owned textile factories. When he was seven years old, his parents sent him to Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), where he fitted in comfortably. The rise of the Nazis drove him to leave for the University of Bordeaux in France in 1933, and subsequently the Sorbonne and the University of Vienna.^[1]

World War II[edit]

Thomas's biography gives an account of his war years. When France fell to the Nazis, he lived in Nice, under the Vichy government, changing his name to Michel Thomas so he could operate in the French Resistance movement more easily. He was arrested several times, and finally sent to Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence. In August 1942, Thomas got released from Les Milles using forged papers and made his way to Lyon, where his duties for the Resistance entailed recruiting Jewish refugees into the organization. In January 1943, he was arrested and interrogated by Klaus Barbie, only being released after convincing the Gestapo officer that he was an apolitical French artist. He would later testify at the 1987 trial of Barbie in Lyon, although the prosecutor 'threw doubt' on Thomas' testimony with regard to the 'difficulties of identification' after so much time had elapsed.^[2]

In February 1943, after being arrested, tortured and subsequently released by the Milice, the Vichy French paramilitary militia,^[3] he joined a commando group in Grenoble, assisting the OSS, and then the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. When Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945, Thomas learned the whereabouts of Emil Mahl (the 'hangman of Dachau'), whom Thomas arrested two days later.^[3] Thomas, along with CIC colleague Ted Kraus, subsequently captured SS Major Gustav Knittel (wanted for his role in the Malmedy massacre). Thomas also engineered a post-war undercover sting operation that resulted in the arrest of several former SS officers. A 1950 Los Angeles Daily News article credits Thomas with the capture of 2,500 Nazi war criminals.^[4]

In the final week of World War II, Thomas was instrumental in rescuing from destruction a cache of Nazi documents that had been shipped by the Gestapo to be pulped at a paper mill in Freimann, Germany. These included the worldwide membership card file of more than ten million members of the Nazi party.^[5]

After the end of the war, Thomas learned that his parents and most of his extended family had died in Auschwitz.^[1]

Post-war years[edit]

In 1947, Thomas emigrated to Los Angeles, where an uncle and cousins resided. He opened a language school in Beverly Hills called the 'Polyglot Institute' (later renamed 'The Michel Thomas Language Center')^[6] and developed a language-teaching system known as the 'Michel Thomas Method', which he claimed would allow students to become conversationally proficient after only a few days' study.^[7]

He remained unmarried until 1978 when he wed Los Angeles schoolteacher Alice Burns; the couple had a son and daughter before the marriage ended in a divorce.^[8]

Thomas's clients included diplomats, industrialists, and celebrities.^[6] The success of the school led to tours and a second school in New York City, as well as a series of instructional books and tapes in French, Spanish, German, and Italian.^[9] At the time of his death in 2005, Thomas's tapes, CDs, and books were the leading method of recorded language-learning in the United Kingdom.^[10]

In 1997, Thomas participated in a BBC television science documentary, The Language Master, in which he taught a five-day course in French to a group of UK sixth form students who had no previous experience with the language. Throughout the course of the five days, the feelings of the students toward the project would radically amend from low esteem prior to the first session to highly confident by the last day.^[11]

Defamation lawsuit, Silver Star[edit]

In 2001, when the Los Angeles Times published a profile casting doubts about Thomas's war record,^[12] he unsuccessfully sued the newspaper for defamation.^[13][14] In 2004, after archival documents and recent testimonials of Thomas's surviving World War II comrades were submitted to the U.S. Army by SenatorJohn McCain and RepresentativeCarolyn Maloney, Thomas was awarded the Silver Star for 'gallantry in action against the enemy in France from August to September 1944 while a lieutenant in the French Forces of the Interior attached to the [U.S.] 1st Battalion, 180th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division.'^[15] The award was presented by former Senator Robert Dole and Senator John Warner at the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., on May 25, 2004.^[16]

Michel Thomas method[edit]

Michel Thomas was a language teacher with a specific approach to teaching. Thomas proposed that there is no such thing as a student with learning difficulties, only teachers with teaching difficulties.^[17] According to Dr. Jonathan Solity of University College London, Thomas held that there are three critical components of the teaching environment:

1. 'The first is the analysis of the material to be learned. If the analysis is correct, teaching is easier and the subsequent learning of the pupil ensured.'
2. 'The second is isolating and structuring the most useful information to teach so that there is a logical progression in the skills, knowledge and concepts taught. Easier skills are taught before more difficult ones and useful information is taught before less useful information. In this context useful information is defined in terms of its generalisability and wider applicability.'
3. 'The third component of the learning environment is determining the best way of presenting skills, knowledge and concepts to students so that learning is facilitated.'^[17]

The method presents the target language by interleaving new with old material, teaching generalization from language principles, contextual diversity, and learning self-correction in an environment that attempts to be stress-free, as the teacher is responsible for learning, not the student.^[18]

Thomas felt his method would 'change the world'; he only started with languages as he felt that it was the most alien thing a person could learn. Solity claims the method 'has huge implications for teaching anybody anything'.^[19]

Death[edit]

Thomas died of cardiac failure at his home in New York City on January 8, 2005, aged 90.^[20]

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abRobbins, Christopher. Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas Story (2000). New York Free Press/Simon & Schuster. ISBN978-0-7432-0263-3/Republished as Courage Beyond Words (2007). New York McGraw-Hill. ISBN0-07-149911-3
2. ^Chicago Tribune, 'Barbie Prosecutor Demands Life Term,' by Julian Nundy, July 1, 1987
3. ^ ^ab'Michel Thomas'. www.michelthomas.org. Retrieved March 16, 2019.
4. ^Los Angeles Daily News, 'Hangman of Dachau' tries to blackmail war hero', by Sara Boynhoff, February 17, 1950.
5. ^“In the final week of World War II, Michel Thomas, a Jewish concentration camp inmate who had escaped the Nazis and joined the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps as it swept into Germany, received a tip about a convoy of trucks in the vicinity of Munich said to be carrying unknown, but possibly valuable cargo. Thomas went to the trucks' destination, where he discovered an empty warehouse filled with veritable mountains of documents and cards with photos attached. He had come upon the complete worldwide membership files of the Nazi Party, which had been sent to the mill to be destroyed on the orders of the Nazi leadership in Berlin. Thomas and others ensured that the documents were protected. Prosecutors at Nuremberg found invaluable evidence in these files, as have generations of prosecutors since that time.”[1]
6. ^ ^abWrathrall, Clare (December 11, 2004), 'Brush Up Your Bad Language', Daily Telegraph
7. ^Flintoff, John-Paul (March 27, 2004), 'The Man Who'd Like to Teach the World to Talk', Financial Times, archived from the original on December 21, 2007, retrieved August 15, 2007
8. ^'Michel Thomas'. January 13, 2005. Retrieved March 16, 2019 – via www.telegraph.co.uk.
9. ^Buxton, Alexandra (December 11, 2004), 'Hola! Me llamo Alexandra', Daily Telegraph
10. ^Campbell, Sophie (February 5, 2005), 'Now Repeat After Me', The Daily Telegraph
11. ^The Language MasterArchived 2010-02-06 at the Wayback Machine at the British Film Institute Film & TV Database
12. ^Los Angeles Times, 'Larger Than Life,' by Roy Rivenburg, April 15, 2001
13. ^189 F.Supp.2d 1005. Thomas v. Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2004.
14. ^'Michel Thomas'. www.michelthomas.org. Retrieved March 16, 2019.
15. ^Silver Star Citation at web site of US Rep. Carolyn Maloney, (D-NY)'
16. ^'Sixty years after nomination, veteran gets Silver Star at WWII memorial'. www.freerepublic.com. Retrieved March 16, 2019.
17. ^ ^abP.79, Jonathan Solity, The Learning Revolution, Hodder Educational, London, 2008.
18. ^P.109-123, Jonathan Solity, The Learning Revolution, Hodder Educational, London, 2008.
19. ^Lipsett, Anthea (September 1, 2008). 'Anthea Lipsett on the teaching methods of legendary language guru Michel Thomas'. Retrieved March 16, 2019 – via www.theguardian.com.
20. ^https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2005/01/11/michel-thomas-dies/ee8e8871-1d0d-48e5-8f40-4d2f2a146850/

External links[edit]

• Guardian Obituary by Christopher Robbins, author of Thomas's biography
• Washington Post Obituary by Adam Bernstein

Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. ?

The Michel Thomas Method is a popular approach in language learning, with a range of language courses available for beginners. British newspaper The Times has called the Michel Thomas Method “The nearest thing to painless learning.” So, we decided to do our own Michel Thomas review.

Michel Thomas courses are all in audio, and you learn by pausing the audio and translating the teacher’s spoken phrases into the target language.

Pixma k10392. Over time, you’re encouraged to use the phrases you’ve learned as building blocks to create longer sentences.

There are plenty of good reviews on Amazon (the Spanish course scores an average of 4.3 stars).

But does it work in practice?

I took on the challenge of completing the full Michel Thomas Total Portuguese course to see what happened.

I started as an absolute beginner…and I’ll share exactly how it worked for me.

Here are my thoughts – plus later on I’ll share a video of myself speaking Portuguese after completing the course.

Michel Thomas Review: Getting Started

Michel Thomas courses are designed for absolute beginners. They purposely avoid great depth, and instead focus on helping you have a variety of simple conversations, for example, while on holiday.

I found the course incredibly easy to understand and get started.

In particular, I really enjoyed that the course is 100% audio. No videos, no flashcards. No reading or writing. I could sit there with my eyes closed and not worry about writing stuff down or watching for visual and audio clues at the same time.

In the audio, you join two other students in a virtual “classroom”. You listen in on the students’ lesson, and complete simple language challenges with them. When the other students are asked to translate a phrase, you’re meant to pause the playback, and translate it yourself first.

I liked this method of learning.

Michel Thomas Review: What Did I Learn?

I found that the Michel Thomas course was relevant to the real world. In taking the course, I learned words and phrases that every student should learn early on.

There are no useless sentences like “The business meeting has been moved to the yacht”, which only a certain type of traveler would want to learn.

Instead, you learn phrases like:

• “Why don’t you want to go there today?”
• “Where did you eat yesterday?”
• “I don’t need this, but I want it.”

The Michel Thomas course avoids teaching a lot of specific vocabulary, which saves you from memorising.

How does this work? Rather than teaching a big list of nouns, it teaches “this”, “that” and “it”, so you can at least point to an object and talk about it without knowing its name.

I commend the course creators for trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. I can now talk about a variety of topics without needing to know a whole lot of specific vocabulary. I can point to an object and say, “How much does that cost?”, or point to a museum and say, “Let’s go there tomorrow.” Phrases like this would certainly come in handy on a short trip to a Portuguese-speaking country.

However, while I found this an effective way to learn the basics of Portuguese, it’s not all that helpful during video conversations, as you’ll see from my video at the end of this article! When it’s just you and the other speaker, there’s nothing to point at; you need to know the actual words for the items you’re talking about.

In addition, the course manages to cover all of the major verb tenses, which is unusual in a course for absolute beginners (I studied French for five years in school before I learned the future tenses!).

All that said, I did have some issues with the Michel Thomas approach.

I noticed that the course skipped over virtually all pleasantries that you would expect to exchange with any new person you meet in your target language. No “What’s your name?”, “How are you?” or “Where are you from?” I had my first Portuguese lesson online after completing the course, and I couldn’t even say, “My name is Holly”!

I would have really liked to learn some more “greeting”-type vocabulary, so that I can walk up to a vendor, for example, and say “Hi, how are you? Nice day today” instead of launching right into, “How much is that?”

The title of the course is “Total Portuguese”, but I feel like this is a bit of an overstatement. It does teach useful material, but it only teaches the basics. No more, no less.

As an additional aside, the course focuses only on the most formal way to address people in Portuguese until very late in the course. I found this frustrating. When I started using Portuguese on italki, my teachers used the informal “tu” form of verbs, and expected me to do the same. But the Michel Thomas method encourages near-exclusive use of the formal forms “o senhor”/”a senhora” and “você”, meaning I was very inexperienced with the “tu” form, which is conjugated quite differently.

Overall, I’d say I learned a lot of useful phrases – but not enough to be a well-rounded Portuguese speaker, even at beginner level.

Michel Thomas Review: Did I Actually Remember What I Learned?

A big part of learning another language is motivation. Being accountable to another person (or a teacher) and tracking your progress can be a huge help with staying motivated.

How does the Michel Thomas method fare here?

Michel Thomas is a static course, so there’s no teacher to keep you accountable. But because the course is so easy to follow (“No homework! No memorizing!”), there’s really nothing for you to shy away from.

The course is completely in audio – available in CD or audiobook format. I went with the CD option, and it was easy and pleasant enough for me to listen to a CD every day. I never looked for any excuses not to sit down and listen to the course.

I was really pleased with the amount of repetition in the course. The material wasn’t particularly diverse, but the teaching method made darn sure that I wouldn’t forget the words and phrases that I learned. The teacher accomplishes this by incrementally introducing new material, and then instantly quizzing the students (and me, the listener) on that and previous material.

The material was just challenging enough to hold my attention. But it can easily become boring if you don’t use it the way it’s intended. You need to make a genuine attempt at answering the teacher’s questions before moving on, or else the material will just wash over you and you’ll forget it.

I would try to guess the correct answer to all of the teacher’s questions (out loud!) before the students in the studio could. It wasn’t so easy that I always guessed correctly, and I appreciated the challenge of this.

It really helped to listen to two other students learn at the same time as me. They usually asked the same questions that I would have if I had been having a live lesson. This almost made me feel like I was taking an interactive lesson, which helped my motivation even more.

Other than working your way through the classes, there’s no real way to track your progress. That said, I don’t think that the course intends to help you track your progress.

It certainly makes sure you do progress, by quizzing you constantly on both old and new material. But it falls short of actually measuring it. However, after the audio course is complete, the last CD includes a series of tests to check your knowledge. You’re then provided with a score. This is the one place in the course where you can get a concrete measurement of your total progress.

One more thing: All of the repetition and the teacher’s corrections were fabulous for my pronunciation. I surprised my Skype teacher in my first lesson with how good my Portuguese pronunciation was. But she was also surprised at how limited my vocabulary was! The course really does teach absolute basics for getting by; not having a detailed conversation in the language.

Michel Thomas Method: The Verdict

Would I use the Michel Thomas Method again? That is to say – was it worth the time and effort?

Quick answer: I would use it again, but with some caveats.

The Michel Thomas course claims that you’ll “go from absolute beginner to confident speaker” in Portuguese. And technically, I did! The words and phrases that the course teaches (however limited) I learned very well and could use confidently.

When I use Michel Thomas in the future, I’ll definitely use it as a supplement to my other studies in the target language, rather than as a standalone resource. For Portuguese, however, I didn’t want to use any other study methods, or else I wouldn’t have an accurate idea of exactly what the Michel Thomas course can and can’t do for absolute beginners. After using only Michel Thomas as my first exposure to Portuguese, I can conclude that while it’s helpful, it doesn’t go the full distance on its own.

For my next language mission (whatever that might be!), if a Michel Thomas course exists for that language, I would use it. It’s a low-stress way to get over that initial hump, from being able to say nothing in the language to being able to say a variety of phrases.

The course brought me from knowing absolutely zero Portuguese – not even “yes” or “no” – to being able to confidently have quite a few short, very simple exchanges.

You can pick up Michel Thomas Total Portuguese on Amazon.

Michel Thomas French Audio Download

My Video Speaking Portuguese After Competing Michel Thomas

Once I’d completed Michel Thomas Total Portuguese I made a video of myself chatting with a native speaker. To prepare for this video, I had three lessons on italki after I’d finished the Michel Thomas course.

Michel Thomas French Mp3

Here’s the video (which actually became the start of a Portuguese in 3 Months mission):

Translate English To French Free

I enjoyed learning Portuguese so much that I decided to take on a Portuguese in 3 Months Mission after finishing the Michel Thomas course. You can read more about my mission here.