daveydave

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...

Ok, some time ago I mentioned that I was absolutely going to learn German. I mentioned how past language learning efforts had failed and how I proposed to succeed this time around. So how am I doing? Well, the title of this post probably gives you a rough idea. I'm at the very annoyed with myself  stage and have come to the conclusion that I can either get on with it, or stop pretending. I'm going former. One of the main problems I'm having is setting aside time. Solution: the car journey to work gives me at least 45 minutes a day to work with. But: some language courses aren't ideal for use in this situation because you really need to refer to the book. And so I introduce Michel Thomas. I say introduce, his courses have been around for decades but I've never used them before because they are 100% audio and I always want to be able to read a write too. However, they are 100% audio, so they should suit car-based study. I bought the Start German taster to try ou...

I'm sure that I'm not alone in my first taste of a foreign language being at school, when I started being taught French around the age of 10. And I mean being taught  French rather than learning the thing. Classrooms full of teenagers are not great places to build a working relationship with a language, but at least they force you to do it. This has been an ongoing problem for me in my post-school attempts to learn languages. I have dabbled in a few: Japanese, Turkish and Spanish - but I haven't really got anywhere near fluent. I could hold a basic conversation in Japanese, even read and write a bit - night classes helped there. I could order food and drink in Turkish, again night classes were a big help. Spanish I struggled with - no night class. But, despite mixed results, I'm keen - really keen - to avoid being one of those English speakers who relies on the fact that "everyone speaks English". I really want to be able to converse in another language and ...