Sunshine Language School

Michel Thomas was the probably the world’s most expensive language teacher, charging up to to $30,000 for a one week course. Great money if you can get it! His client list of celebrities - headed by none other than Princess Grace of Monaco, ensured that the master language teacher and salesman had a steady stream of well heeled clients beating a path to his door to language schools.

Since then, and prior to his death, he made his techniques available to the masses through recorded sessions that are now available on language audio CD’s. I did his Michel Thomas Learn French course on an audio CD and it has some very good points about it for the beginner.

The main thing is that the Michel Thomas approach is that the teacher leads the student through a path and builds his or her confidence by leading through various important modal verbs - would, could, should - etc and puts quite heavy emphasis on the use of cognates (the words that are similar in the target vis a vis English language).

This way the student can build confidence quite quickly and is soon handling sentences in the target language.

Michel Thomas has courses in the following languages:

Michel Thomas Learn French
Michel Thomas Learn Spanish
Michel Thomas Learn German
Michel Thomas Learn Italian
… as well as a number of other language learning guides and products. They are a great tool to help you learn a language, but you will need far more materials than this to really learn a language.

The Foreign Service Institute which is one of the greatest language schools in the world, being the (language training division of the US State Department)  has devised a grading system of language learning proficiency and they estimate that a good, motivated student requires 240 hour of focussed study to achieve the basic levels of interaction in a language.

To  achieve a level or professional proficiency, their research found, requires about 750 hours of focussed, structured study within their disciplined language training framework. This will get you Level 4 of their language learning levels. Something like the Michel Thomas courses will not even get you to Level 1, but they are a great addition to your language learning arsenal and toolbox, and another tool to use in the consolidation of your language learning.

I only did Michel Thomas’s Learn French course and can recommend it in terms of getting students building confidence with the language. But one thing to be careful of with the Michel Thomas French audios is that Michel does the language teaching himself on it.  But be aware that Michel Thomas’s French accent is not very French, despite his period of education at the Sorbonne. It sounds like a Polish-German combination. So imagine a student learning English from a person with Polish-German accent, well you can imagine how/her his English is going to sound! Well that is how your French will sound if you rely SOLELY on the Michel Thomas Learn French course. I cannot comment on the Michel Thomas Learn Spanish, Learn Italian, Learn German or Learn Anything else courses.