Friday, August 13, 2010

Review: Michel Thomas French Language Course

The Michel Thomas language courses come in the format of live lessons with two students. This potentially dreadful format actually works very well and you find yourself competing with the recorded students to get the phrase spoken before they answer.

Michel Thomas has quite a strong accent which colours his pronunciation a little but it is not a major issue. The one thing you will learn very quickly and easily is the French verb structure. This is the main strength of this French language course and you will find that you can construct quite long and involved sentences after the first 2 CD’s are completed.

The first course consists of 8 CD’s which are for complete beginners. The advanced course has 5 Further CD’s that deal with more advanced verb forms such as the subjunctive and pluperfect tenses. The amazing thing is that you will start using these word forms naturally because the course gets you talking.
There are no books or dictionaries to go with this course and you will not need them. The Michel Thomas language course makes learning the verbs very easy and intuitive.

There is however one big problem with the course and that is the limited vocabulary that is covered in the course. The company that markets the course is now addressing this issue with special vocabulary modules which is just as well because you will know how to speak French but not have the nouns and adjectives to express yourself without further study.

If you already have a good knowledge of French words, but do not know how to string them together into a good sentence, then this course will be perfect for you. There are other French language courses that cover more ground but none of them will get you talking more fluently than this one.