Michel Thomas Method: Spanish Vocabulary Course (Michel Thomas Method)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Michel Thomas, Rose Lee Hayden Our price £14.99 (£30.00) New from £14.99 Used from £12.50 Pages: (Audio CD) ISBN: 0340939737 Pub: Hodder Arnold Pub date: 2007-05-25 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 15313

Reader Reviews:

Haydenised Spanish. (0/0 people found this helpful)

This vocabulary course was a big disappointment to me after the excellent Michel Thomas CDs.

Even as a beginner, I found the Hayden-American pronunciation of Spanish excruciating: in this respect it seemed to contradict, at times, the teaching of Michel Thomas. Similarly, I did not appreciate her patronising tone.

However, if you can suppress your annoyance, the course is good value for its factual material

Great Practice Course (0/0 people found this helpful)

I think Rose Lee Hayden does a fantastic job bravely stepping into the void left by michel thomas. Rather than just vocabulary - which is often taught most bizarely and ineffectively by some language products - this pakcage still focuses on real language usage, particulary the ability to spontaneously construct your own sentences when prompted to do so.

I really thought of this course as a set of supplementary excercises to the old courses and manages to provide extra vocabularly really as neccessary, none of it forced, like lists of words etc. It's just an enjoyable interactive programme which packs in alot. I disagree with other reviewers and think that Rose judges the tone excellently so that it doesn't become too dry.

The master stroke however is the inclusion of two native speakers, one spanish and one south American (I think Argentinian). Which helps bridge the gap between understanding sentences and words to listening to and comprehending the flow of real speech. Also covers some language points about gender and word transformation that are not in the other courses. The foundation course is a pre-requistite to this I would say

Awful Woman. (0/0 people found this helpful)

I am of a like mind with Rhythmvox (see above) but I have a lower tolerance threshold. This presentation is absolutely awful. How this woman could ever have worked with the Great Michel I cannot imagine. Nor can I think how the publisher could have allowed this product to go out under the Michel Thomas label.
The distinguishing mark of the Michel Thomas method is that there is no cra p ; just plain workmanlike progression, building up to quite advanced grammatical constructions. I have worked through the whole series and what I now lack is idiomatic vocabulary and practice. The practice I can get using a tutor via Skype. Because I need the vocabulary I bought this product. But I just can't stand this awful woman.
If the publisher reads this review I suggest they go back to the text and strip out all the goo. (That would probably reduce the five discs to three.) Recruit a Michel sound-alike and get rid of one or other of the native speakers. There must be a big enough market for the course to be published in two versions. One for Europeans wanting to speak Castilian (Madrid) Spanish and one for Americans wanting to speak Mexican.
The one star I can give these discs is for the fact that they are cheap enough to hang in the hedge to scare off the neighbour's cats. If I wired them up to speakers they would certainly scare off the neighbours!

Sorry to give a negative review on the course of Michel Thomas... (1/1 people found this helpful)

Based on my rather positive experience in using other French courses of Michel Thomas (especially the `Language Builder'), I spontaneously expected a lot from this new course when I decided to get hold of it. I supposed that I would study steadily and make a considerable progress just as I did before. However, I gradually lost interest in studying with this course after using it a few times.

I am not sure what's wrong with this course, but it doesn't make sense to me that this course deems itself to be `Michel Thomas Method' simply by mimicking to assert that users can learn `without the pressure of writing or memorising'. Perhaps the vocabulary covered and organized in this course is the one to blame. Anyway, I still keep studying with other French courses of Michel Thomas, although I have tucked this course into the bottom layer of my bookshelf.

There's no such thing as a bad student only a bad teacher! (2/2 people found this helpful)

...was one of the things Michel Thomas said...and how true...

I agree, that if Michel were alive today he would be up in arms over hearing this, then again if he were here today we wouldn't have had a company trying to hang on to his shirt tails trying to make money.

This is just awful, it is a prime example of how to make learning French the most boring it could possible be. The whole 5 CD's are TOTALLY scripted even down to the patronising "I can here that 'T' being pronounced at the end! Well done!"...no you can't! you're just a CD and you don't have ears!!

The sentences you are asked to repeat are so meaningless it is a struggle to remember how to repeat them in English let alone French!

'Because of the Computer Revolution, the economic situation is not only sustainable but also insatiable' bla bla bla...whatever...

This should have a Government Health Label on the side:

'WARNING - DO NOT LEAVE IN THE REACH OF CHILDREN AS THEY WILL BE PUT OFF LEARNING FRENCH FOR LIFE'

PS Let them have a copy of ANYTHING Michel recorded while he was alive - there were brilliant!

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