German update #1
Ok, so here are some thoughts on the Michel Thomas method of language learning after a month following the German course. I have to say I do like the method. One of the areas of language learning I always find challenging is making sentences from scratch. Not so much the words, but the order because of course German sentence structure is different to English. In other courses that I've tried, you get some example sentences and usually some grammar rules for the construction of those sentences, but it isn't natural and it doesn't sit well in my head. Michel Thomas does a great job of breaking sentences down and reconstructing them in the target language - in this case German - so that the word order starts to feel natural. I really like this aspect of the course. One thing you don't learn a lot of (so far anyway - I am only a couple of CDs into the Total German course) are nouns. The sentences you build make major use of "it". This obviously avoids learning