Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
I've decided to make a concerted effort to learn a language, in my case German. Now, I stayed in Germany for four months in my final year at Uni, 12 years ago and did learn a "smattering" of the language but as we spent most of our time in the Irish Pub, McMurphy's Braunschweig, it was never the best. Time to change that.
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I remember seeing a documentary years ago about this guy who went to an inner city school and in the space of a couple of days made amazing strides in teaching a bunch of no hopers French. Michel Thomas was his name. I can't continue without mentioning his wig. Appalling, one of the worst ever, had to get that out of the way. Anyway, as a language teacher he's good, very good.
His method requires no writing or memorising, you learn the language as you learnt your own, by listening, thinking and repeating. Very quickly you can string sentences together without worrying about the theory of subjunctive verbs and past participles etc. Maybe not so good if you want to read or write in the language but for a good grasp of conversing in a foreign language this is the one.
My iPod is packed with 8 hours of tuition and I intend to fill my spare time with listening and learning. Our attitude to foreign languages in Britain is appalling (I blame the bitch thatcher). I deal with Engineers and customers from all over Europe and Asia and they all speak English perfectly well (many have more than one foreign language under their belts) it's embarrassing. I'm not intending to make use of German in my work life but at least it's a step in the right direction to an equal footing with people from all round the world.
Back to Michel, his false teeth don't fit too well which can make listening to the MP3s interesting :-) but the guy's results can't be faulted. That wig though, sheesh.
posted by Ricky Dee at
8:18 PM
2 Comments:
Got the Michel Thomas Italian Cds and they are very good. I did find that they leave you very limited in your vocabulary though.
By
David, at 18 March 2006 19:09
True about the vocabulary but you can get that from a dictionary. With the German course, and I imagine it's the same with the Italian, he has a knack of getting you to think in the language which means you can construct sentences correctly very early on. Once you know the structure you can easily plug the words in the correct places. With German he only teaches the formal rules but there's no harm in being polite.
By
Ricky Dee, at 19 March 2006 12:05
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