Product Description

Learn another language the way you learnt your own! As a child, you learnt your own language naturally and enjoyably: now you can learn Spanish vocabulary in the same way.

• Use the unique method perfected over fifty years by the celebrated psychologist and linguist Michel Thomas
• This method works with your brain, helping you to build up your Spanish in manageable, enjoyable steps by thinking out the answers for yourself.
• You learn through listening and speaking – the way you learnt as a child.
• You then pick up the language naturally and unforgettably.

This NEW Vocabulary Course builds on the Foundation and Advanced Courses to increase the number and range of words you will be able to use. Rose Lee Hayden, Michel Thomas’s most trusted teacher, shares her first-hand insights to give you over 1,000 words in a unique and memorable way. She is joined by two native speakers to make sure your pronunciation is perfect, while a booklet shows you the written language.

You'll stick with it because you'll love it!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20956 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-25
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: Spanish, English
• Binding: Audio CD

Review
"Ideal for any business traveller who needs to be able to get around confidently." (Sunday Business )

"A great way to learn; it's fast and it lasts". (The Daily Telegraph )

"Five minutes into the first CD, you already feel like you're winning." (Time Out )

"Michel Thomas is a precious find indeed." (The Guardian )

"Thomas makes it simple" (Sunday Times )

"Michel's methods will teach you effectively and easily" (Daily Star )

"Hugely inspiring" (Red )

"Excellent for learning ... This entirely audio course is easy to use and quickly results in some useful ability in the new language. Great for the car."
 

(Adventure Travel )

"Moving along at a relaxed, slow pace, punctuated by amusing anecdotes and jokes from the teacher, the new words, phrases and language rules are gently introduced and reinforced through subtle repetition without ever being tedious. In fact, despite a distinct emphasis on non-work, the course proves very effective and enjoyable, and its format is ideal for learning anywhere you like. So, if you only want to learn to speak the language, this course is highly recommended."

(Top Real Travel Product, Real Travel )

About the Author
Dr Rose Lee Hayden had a highly successful career in the US, before moving from New York to live in Italy in the wake of 9/11. At the age of 17 she started working as a volunteer for the American Red Cross travelling throughout South America and becoming fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. On graduating from university she went on to work as an instructor of Spanish for the Peace Corps, rising to become Deputy Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, responsible for a $20 million language and cultural programme. She met Michel Thomas in 1982 as a result of her interest in his innovative method and amazing results, and studied German with him. This was the beginning of a long and exciting collaboration, developing his programme and teaching his ‘Second Phase’ Spanish students. She now lives outside Rome, where she continues to write, teach, and play jazz piano.

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Customer Reviews

Not worthy of the Michel Thomas brand
I'm a massive advocate of Michel Thomas's work. I'm constantly recommending his courses to my friends for their ease of use, simplicity and the positive feeling you get from learning via his method. The only problem is that the success of his method is totally dependent on Michel himself, particularly his own in-depth knowledge, his limitless enthusiasm for languages, and particularly his adaptability, empathy and personable nature, all of which are in evidence in his CDs. This is a problem because Michel Thomas did not make or present this course.

This French Vocabulary course is superficially similar to those that Michel Thomas made and presented. However, they lack all of the subtlety, ingenuity, instinct and personal connection that made his courses so enjoyable and effective.

On the positive side there are certain aspects of the method that still work. The building up of phrases around basic structures and the structured repetition of vocabulary remain the same and help you to learn without too much effort. And the 'tricks' taught to help transform English vocabulary to French are often very effective.

On the negative side, the whole thing comes across as fake, forced, and ultimately downright irritating. The woman presenting is truly awful, she couldn't possibly sound more insincere if she tried and her continual 'encouragement' comes across as trite, scripted and patronising. The choices of phrase have been noted in other reviews as being curiously dull and uninspiring and I entirely agree. Often the sentences chosen are expressions of displeasure or irritation (e.g. 'that noise is insufferable', or 'the dinner was tolerable'), while at other times they are obtuse or almost pointless. I am at a loss as to why they thought it was a good idea to have so many sentences that are either dull or have a negative slant, and I am 100% sure Michel Thomas wouldn't have endorsed it. Finally, they have chosen in this course to ditch the real students that were used in Michel Thomas's course in favour of recordings of native French speakers. This was presumably in order to aid pronunciation, or perhaps more likely to avoid the complexities of face-to-face teaching. Whatever the reasoning, the result is that the 'method' and the recording don't match, adding to the feeling of inauthenticity. It is ridiculous to hear native French speakers being congratulated in a sickly ingratiating voice for correctly pronouncing words in their own language. Additionally, the empathy that you feel with the students in Michel Thomas's courses, which also makes you feel like Michel Thomas is teaching you personally, is completely lost. In my eyes this was an important part of the method.

The consequence of all this is that when listening to this course you are inclined to do the one thing that Michel Thomas dedicated so much effort to stop you from doing - you turn the CD off and do something else instead. The whole point of the Michel Thomas method was to make learning fun, stress-free and rewarding so that people would enjoy language learning and devote more time and energy to it. By producing something that doesn't meet this simple criterion the makers of this CD have, in my view, completely betrayed the biggest single principle on which his method was based. I am not at all impressed, and the words 'cashing in' come strongly to mind.

Perhaps if you've never heard a genuine Michel Thomas course you won't be so disappointed by this, and if you don't find the woman annoying then you may well get more out of it. However, I would recommend anyone to stick to the recordings that Michel Thomas made himself - which are exceptional - and to find other methods for building up your vocabulary. After all, building a large vocabulary was never what his method was designed to do. His aim was to give you the fundamental building blocks of your target language, before passing you the responsibility to build on that structure yourself.

A fantastic Conclusion to The Spanish Series
This vocabulary course builds on the structure that Michel Thomas laid down in his foundation and advanced courses.

Sadly, Michel passed away in 2005, so this course has been written by a long-standing teacher in his language school, Dr Rose Lee Haydon.

For anyone thinking of purchasing this I've made a summary below of what you can expect to cover. I think it will be of interest to those who are beginners or intermediate students or anyone want to brush up on rusty Spanish skills.

The course is very much based on cognates to give a large vocabulary (about 2 CD's worth). In all over 1,000 words are taught on the five CD's.

The next couple of CD's go through Verbs in the tenses covered in Michel's courses.

Some of the verbs covered (in Spanish) are

To avoid
To tempt
To use
To invent
To mention
To form
To spend

Should
To shout
To earn
To invite
To Justify
To dine
To inspire
To admire
To install
To adore
To consider
To acuse
To inspire
to Classify
To study
To console
To administer
To negociate
to clean
To call
To look at
To lend
To kiss
To touch
To attack
To drink
To learn
To understand
To answer
To write

Reflexive Verbs (a whole assortment)

To promise
To be able
To fit in to
To rain
To offer
To protect oneself
To defend oneself
To sell
To be worth
To fear
To cough
To believe
To grow
To recognise
To place
To admit
To insist on
To invade
To omit
To decide
To suffer
To recieve
To cover
To describe
To open
To flee
To permit
To prohibit
To attend
To say
To go out
To sleep
to destroy
To translate
To produce
to climb up
To go out
To lose
To deny
To think
To close

Irregular verbs

Expressions that trigger the subjunctive

The last couple of CD's cover everyday expressions particularly those using hacer and tener and questioning words.

Clarification when to use por and para and Ser/Estar

Making comparisons

Using opposite meanings to build vocabulary eg. Good and Bad, Pretty and Ugly etc

Much of this was familar to me, but the course is a great reminder of the shortcuts for creating your own vocabulary and manipulating verb tenses. I also liked the fact that a model for pronunciation is given by a native speaker from Spain (a woman) and a male speaker from Latin America. So this course will be good for anyone planning on going to any Spanish speaking country who wants to practice the correct pronunciation for their destination.

Rose Lee Haydon is superb (to my ears she has an excellent Spanish accent), she is also very encouraging, I did miss Michel's voice but his legacy is obviously in good hands. A recommendation to buy.

A little less presentation, please
The classic format of the Michel Thomas Spanish series, as represented by the Foundation and Advanced courses, is `live' lessons given to real students. This works for as long as the students' abilities exceed or match your own. Repeated plays of someone else's mistakes will eventually wear anyone down. This does not detract from the quality of the courses: proper use of the CDs will ensure a sound and solid grounding in the language.

The series also includes 'Review' and 'Language Builder' editions. The Review courses are edited versions of the relevant original course, while Language Builder expands on vocabulary and colloquial knowledge. The common factor in these deviations is they feature Michel Thomas alone, talking directly to you, the only student. One-on-one is generally deemed the most effective way of teaching and these courses are no exception: the lack of distraction is a welcome contrast to the Foundation and Advanced courses.

The format in this latest edition is different again: two native speakers replace the students - a great improvement on a good idea - while Rose Lee Hayden takes the role of the great man. One strives to be objective, but from a personal angle, this is where it all starts to come apart.

Even with the conversational possibilities inherent with two students live in a studio, Michel Thomas very rarely strayed from the business of teaching the language and certainly never descended into small talk, all the time keeping a coherent path and displaying impeccable manners, even when his patience was being tested. Rose Lee however, despite only having the microphone for company, takes every opportunity to inject a 'personality' into proceedings, which as the template demonstrates, is utterly unnecessary. Over time and with repeated plays, this constant eager sincerity can become very irritating indeed.

The sort of thing that happens is: you're invited to speak an answer; you respond and get it right. Your teacher says "Right!". Do you feel encouraged? Bear in mind you are conversing with a CD. You try answering another, but maybe this time you get it wrong. Don't worry, because teacher excitedly shouts "Good for you!!!" and never fails to respond positively to every answer. It becomes hard to know which is the most annoying: being congratulated for getting it right or for getting it wrong.
You try hard to resist the invitation to answer back, but then you notice yet another sentence beginning with "As Michel Thomas told us..." - OK, no big deal, she's just pushing the brand, but more than once you will hear Rose Lee claim that she just knows how good your Spanish is (how?) and that you should feel free to go back and check out the Michel Thomas courses and a whole lot other stuff you already know, until it gets really crazy and it sounds like she's being equally patronising to the native speakers, saying "Yes!" or "Right!" every time they chip in with their idea of how it's said, so that in the end, your challenge becomes how to find a way of stopping yourself shouting at your CD machine - "For the love of god, wouldya please just cut the cra p and get on with some godda m Spanish!!!".

Did I mention that Rose Lee speaks in a very broad American accent? Do you think that could be part of the problem?

Obviously, this is a very subjective review and it should perhaps be emphasised that there is no intention to put anyone off the idea of buying this set of CDs, though if you're already a Michel Thomas fan, that's hardly likely anyway. It's great value for money and despite some other minor inconsistencies, a worthy addition to the series, containing a mass of excellent material that will help any diligent student improve their Spanish.

The thing is, they may have to work for it. If you are comfortable in the role of small schoolchild, grab it with both hands. Others of a less malleable nature, be sure to take my tip - practise deep breathing exercises before and after each session and you'll get through.