Courses comparison: Pimsleur vs. Michel Thomas

[Kleo]

How used to picking up other languages are you?

How aware are you of asking grammatical questions?

Let's say you want to learn French. You download and watch French in Action, listen to Pimsleur or Michel Thomas, pick up some parallel readers, and most importantly, make a French friend.

I'd caution anybody with the sort of attitude that choosing between Pimsleur or Michel Thomas will affect or limit their language studies: you might have heard it a million times, but none of these programs are going to make you fluent on their own.

The main difference between Pimsleur and Michel Thomas is that the latter will drill get you started speaking creatively, whereas the other will drill a system of intonation and phrasing into your head which it will assume is entirely foreign to you. You can listen to all of Pimsleur and still not have a generalizable impression of what you're doing with the content you've been endlesly drilled, even though you'll have perfect, swfit command over the utterances you've been drilled through until the end.

It's the difference between having an experienced language tutor who knows what he's doing explain language structure to you, or having a more impersonal, memory-based system brute-force its material into your memory. You might say that one has blood, while the other doesn't; but they both work very well in precisely the way they were intended.

So you can have an idea of Pimsleur's genius in spite of the faults I've laid out I'll give you this: By the end of Michel Thomas's advanced course, I couldn't a good chunk of the utterances in Pimsleur near the end. They spoke too fast or used words I didn't understand.

So in terms of time-of-study, if I were you I would choose on this basis: if you are better at picking up a grammar text for a new language and assimilating all the grammar points on your own, then go with Pimsleur. If you are better at throwing yourself into the way a language is pronounced and sounds by whatever means necessary, then go with Michel Thomas. In both cases the method of teaching will complement what you will be most inclined to do next.

But a couple things about Michel Thomas:

No, having to pause the tapes does not make it longer than Pimsleur, as one poster implied.

No, the way Michel Thomas presents grammar is not anywhere close to being akin to the way Japanese grammar is presented in early study. Beginning Japanese pedagogy could actually learn a hell of a lot from Michel Thomas's methodology, which is creative, intuitive, and designed for automatic retention. (that this poster was lamentably clueless is seen clearly in his incomprehensible assumption that the poster he was responding to had equated "aimer" and "voloir", which he had not) His way of teaching grammar is very creative, and at least for French and German, highly effective.

On the other hand, I listened to a handful of Pimsleur first, and I still think it helped get me started emoting in french better than Michel Thomas did. But after Michel Thomas (including the advanced course) I couldn't finish listening to the Pimsleur french course, it had come to seem very slow; it assumed I was starting from scratch, and by that point I wasn't anymore, and by then I had the ability to make use of a much broader range of study material, like the free audiolab exercises from about.com, or a book called "Tune Up Your French".

Kleo

[Conchita]

[Heropsychodreamer]

Kleo, this is a great post, and i enjoyed the read. I am just completing Pimsleur French and will move onto Michel Thomas, to get a different perspective and maybe learn some new things.

[Frelin]