Michel Thomas Method: Mandarin Chinese Foundation Course (Michel Thomas Series)

For once in my life I've actually completed a language course. And very enjoyable it was, too. I actually looked forward to doing it. It was rarely a chore. And I think I must've retained 70% of what I was taught. However, it was only on the last CD that I realised that the majority of it was utterly useless. I mean, okay, if you want to say, "He has a television under his table," it's quite brilliant. Or "Do you have a good teacher in your school?" Again, essential. But if you want survival language to get you around China, alas, it's a major disappointment. Pity that.

Buy the foundation course! (1/1 people found this helpful)

OK so I bought the introductory taster course. It really works, i enjoyed it, i feel confident using the tones.. perfect. Only problem is that it is too short, so now I am buying the full foundation course - of which I have already done the first 2 hours. Go straight for the foundation course - it is a leap of faith to some extent, but it will save you a bit of money and more waiting around for the postman.

Great stuff!

Amazing Course that gives you the ability to sound Chinese! (3/3 people found this helpful)

First of all, I'm a Michel Thomas fan. From seeing his documentary in 1997 'The Language Master' I knew he had stumbled on/discovered an intuitive way to learn languages.

I bought his French course in 2001 with excitement - and thoroughly enjoyed it.

As impressed as I was; it always bugged me 'How about an exotic language, like Arabic or Chinese? That would prove this method to work'. Years passed. Michel Thomas died. I thought that was it.

2 years ago, I made friends with some Chinese people and I always said to them that I'd learn mandarin. I never did! I knew from my language learning experience that any course I bought would be a hard slog - unless it was MT.

So it was with great excitement I discovered this course in March this year. I immediately went to my friends and asked 'How long would it take me to learn Mandarin to a basic conversational level?'. They replied, 3-4 hours study a day, for six months.

I replied 'See you in one month'. Such was my confidence in the method that before I'd even ordered it, I knew it would make me proficient as it had done for French & Spanish.

I listened to the course entirely in the car, with my hand signals for tones (and managed to avoid crashing twice!) and after 2 weeks I'd done the Foundation, and then moved onto the Advanced.

During this time I was amazed at how a language so alien was going in and sticking.

Just before I met my friends, I bumped into another Chinese friend of mine and I started addressing her in Chinese. At first, she thought I knew the odd word, but as the conversation continued she began to realise I could speak well. At one point she asked why I'd learned Chinese? I replied 'because I have Chinese friends and I want to speak to them' in Mandarin - she was gobsmacked!

When my friends came round, they too were amazed and very encouraging. One even remarked that I had a 'Beijing' accent. After 1 month? LOL.

What else can I say about this course? Only, if you're planning to learn Mandarin, this has to be your starting point.

Harold Goodman has done an amazing job of making something so alien to us Westerners come so easily - it is evident he put a huge amount of preparation into it, and has used the Michel Thomas method extremely well.

Buy it!

Good for tones (6/8 people found this helpful)

Having been a big fan of Michel Thomas' previous courses, I was keen to see how his method would work with Chinese, which is a very different language to the European languages he had approached himself. For me the answer was a little mixed.

The best aspect of the course, as highlighted in other reviews, is the treatment of the tones, which is the most useful I have come accross, and it is really on the basis of this that I would recommend the course. Whereas most courses simply repeat the tones in order and rely on the listener to pick up the differences, the Michel Thomas method is excellent here in allowing you to listen to the students making the same mistakes as you would and hearing these mistakes addressed.

The other big advantage of this course over the original courses is that there is now a native speaker, meaning that the accent is a lot more reliable than had previously been the case.

However, I did also have a few problems with the course:

The first is, contrary to some other reviewers, I found the mnemonics, although sometimes good, were often bad. One of the potentially difficult aspects of Chinese is that a lot of the words can sound quite similar, with sounds that do not often appear in English. Harold Goodman seemed often to fall back on quite tenuous methods (e.g. "Mr. Dui was always correct" for Dui=Correct, or "Mrs Xia kept hiding under the table" for Xia=Under) with the result that a lot of the CD seems to be taken up with students not quite remembering the right word. Earworms and the book "Learning Chinese Characters" both cope with this a lot better.

Secondly, I felt that while Chinese grammar is often much simpler than English (for example the verbs don't change form) Harold Goodman's explanations sometimes seemed to make it more complicated than it needed to be. For example in a Chinese question, the word order in a question is exactly the same as it would be in the corresponding statement, but the students seemed to be allowed to go through a number of wrong assumptions (e.g. that the question word went at the end of the sentence) before coming to this conclusion. Sometimes the explanations came across as more of a series of exemptions to rules rather than the logical rules that they are. It gets there in the end, but for me it lacked some of the clarity which made the other Michel Thomas courses so good.

Thirdly, as with all the courses in the series, you will need another course as well to teach the more useful, everyday things you will need to say.

Finally, while Michel Thomas always argued that the aim of speaking a language should be to get the ball over the net (i.e. to be understood), I think it is important to know when you are being taught something that isn't quite right in order to keep things simple so that you can be understood. The course uses only one measure word ("ge") throughout; while this may make more sense in a course of this length than trying to learn the separate measure words, I think it would be helpful to point out that this is not quite correct.

To conclude, I have given this course 4 stars because it is so good on the tones, and useful, if occasionally frustrating elsewhere. However, I felt that it lacked some of the clarity of the old courses, and in the absence of some of the verb forms of the European languages, it didn't seem to have quite the same strong sense of purpose. After completing the German foundation course, I really felt that I had a lot more confidence to say things that I had not thought I would be able to say from such a short course and without putting in a lot of work. After doing this course, I felt quite comfortable describing where a television was in relation to a table (provided the options were limited to above or below), but still would not feel comfortable with anything more complex. It is different enough to be a useful addition for anyone trying to learn Chinese, but for me not quite as good as the originals.

MT Chinese course review (3/3 people found this helpful)

Michel Thomas Foundation course review

Having just completed my 4th MT course (Chinese Foundation) I feel an obligation to share my experiences with others who might be considering buying it. First the conclusion. The Michel Thomas Chinese Foundation Course was excellent: 9 out of 10.

Most of us are under the impression that Chinese is a strange alien language that is almost impossible to learn. They are right it is. When I got my first mandarin course I was presented with an array of strange sounds that made me think of a episode of Star Trek and alien encounter of incomprehensible complexity. With this mind-set I approached the Michel Thomas foundation course with some skepticism. Although I did have a fundamental belief in the soundness of his teaching methodology for Indo-European languages, I had no such belief for any other languages.
I have to admit it was a leap of faith. Which with hindsight has now been richly rewarded.

The first barrier to learning Chinese is this strange concept of using tones for each sound that represents a Chinese character. This is beautifully explained at the beginning of the course by the Professor of Chinese with the excellent assistance of a native speaker. To get the message across he tells a series of stories for each tone and allocates a colour to each of them, as well as a hand gesture (Kinaesthetic modality) for each tone, and by using your fist and fingers to re-enforce the learning experience, make it "memorable". This is subliminal suggestion to the brain, something that practitioners of Accelerated Learning who use modality and NLP use all the time.

The speed at which you progress is fine although there are times when you wonder whether you will get the key basic verbs that are so much part of an MT course. The vocab is reviewed and re enforced at regular intervals.

I have been practising with my Chinese friends. In the beginning I found they were correcting me a lot but as I progressed they become increasingly more impressed with my pronunciation and less critical. The secret now is to get my Chinese to a natural speed and that will only come with practice.

Conclusion.
Learning MT Chinese has changed my perspective of learning new languages and thinking outside the box as the teacher said it would. It has given me lots of new perspectives on a number of things. I am getting interested in writing the characters, also Taoism, Sun Tzu the art of war and the culture and history of China. My studies into the historical origins of languages and how they are all connected together has been given new impetus. I feel I am a richer person for the experience and look forward to going to China sometime in the future. Now a brief word on the Pimsleur course which I have tried. I found it useful to bring my Chinese to a more natural speed and flow.
So there is a place for both courses. But if you have a limited budget, go for the MT Chinese course.

Michel Thomas Method: Mandarin Chinese Foundation Course (Michel Thomas Series)

Harold Goodman

Reader Reviews:

Very enjoyable, but useful? (0/0 people found this helpful)

Buy the foundation course! (1/1 people found this helpful)

Amazing Course that gives you the ability to sound Chinese! (3/3 people found this helpful)

Good for tones (6/8 people found this helpful)

MT Chinese course review (3/3 people found this helpful)

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