Customer Reviews: Read 126 more reviews...
 BRILLIANT September 10, 2008
I learnt more from the first CD than from five years at school. Without doubt this is the easiest and most effective way to learn French. I recently returned from France on a family holiday. I certainly had more confidence than ever before when speaking French.
You are advised to pause the CD and try things out for yourself before the students attempt it, but to be honest you can usually get there before them. I've used the CDs in the car and when out jogging, with no need to pause. If I had to find a groan it would be at the 'not so good' student. Sometimes you get the feeling that she isn't listening and is in her own little world. There are times when I think Michel is thinking the same thing about her.
If you're serious about learning French then this is the only place to start.
A very very clever man indeed May 12, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Let me start with on a good point and say that michels technique is a true work of art
Its only when you have listened to the tapes a few times(and you will need to in order to completely digest it) that you realise how clever he is at making his point.
It really is as close as you can get to painless language tuition.
When I had ingested this course i was convinced that I could speek fluent french,however it is only the introductory course so you will be needing the avanced course after.Which is also exellent,and much more involved.
Now for the bad bit:
I can not for the life of me understand how Michel could have let the course be published with the female american student!!
SHE IS A MORON.
I have never in my whole life been forced to listen to someone as irritating as her.i dont even know her,yet i found myself wanting to strangle her.
It is a shame because she did make it hard to listen to after not a very long time.In fact I edited her out of my cds,now the course is more like the Michel Thomas language builder, which I actually prefered,you can only listen to someone elses mistakes for so long before they start to get annoying especialy as you are improving at the same time.
Having said that I still got a great deal from this course and I highly recommend it.
I want to recommend this particular course April 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This audio course is very important for someone who wants to learn to speak French. Many of the other materials on offer may not be very helpful because they seem to start at a level too difficult, like trying to reach the bottom rung of a ladder and finding it too high, the student is likely to give up. This course fills this very crucial gap and if you have tried before to learn a foreign language and decided you cannot quite make it, then this is the course for you! I was delighted with it for making something achievable that was before potentially too difficult for me. There are minor criticisms which you can pick up from reading some of the other reviews but I would say this is not the important part. What is important is that this course is a significant breakthrough and it is exciting to be enabled to speak French!
 Great System.....Shame about the students! April 7, 2008
I bought the full 8 hour version, having looked at the other reviews. I am quite well into the course at present, and I'm learning so much more with this than I ever did with the horrible dry grammatical way we were taught at school.
Confidence is built up very quickly as Mr Thomas reveals some very easy to remember rules about the thousands of English words with French origin, and how to 're-convert' them back to French. This gives the student a huge stating vocabulary (vocabulaire). The system then uses these words by phrasing sentences in certain ways.
The use of 2 'students' is a good idea, but unfortunately Mr Thomas appears almost as a misogynist, as it is always the female student who gets mixed up, or forgets words completely....allowing the teacher to correct her rather gracelessly.
Anyway, a very easy way to quickly build up a solid base, and confidence in speaking French well.
Fantastic February 6, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I have learned more spoken French from these CDs than in seven years at school which culminated in a decent A level, even though I'm not a natural linguist. I had a fair grasp of vocabulary although I took the A level over 30 years' ago but always lacked confidence in spoken French. What I really liked about it was that I could actually follow it quite well and it made me feel really confident. I found myself looking forward to the next CD rather than regarding it as something I ought to do. I would heartily recommend this and Michel Thomas, who spoke seven languages fluently, seemed like an amazing man - he was born in Poland, fought in the French Resistance and became a US citizen. If you want to learn French, I think this would be a great starting point.
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