Michel Thomas Foundation Course: French (Michel Thomas Series)
by Michel Thomas
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List Price: £69.99
Our Price: £30.95
Your Save: £ 39.04 ( 56% )
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Hodder Arnold
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 9780340938911
Format: Audiobook
ISBN: 0340938919
Label: Hodder Arnold
Publication Date: 2006-09-29
Publisher: Hodder Arnold
Studio: Hodder Arnold
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A very very clever man indeed
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I want to recommend this particular course
Comment: 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!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great System.....Shame about the students!
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Last chance for the idiots
Comment: I spent most of my French lessons at school either fantasising about the teacher or getting stabbed by a compass (the other pupils were as bored as me but clearly lacked my hormonal imagination). So this language course was my last chance to learn the French language, which I'm absolutely in love with. I love the way it sounds, even if I did have to wait until I visited Paris to realise this.
Firstly, this is a spoken language course, so you're going to have to learn how to write/read French later on (although that shouldn't be terribly hard). On the other hand, it doesn't concentrate on silly tourist phrases, although they do crop up. By the end of the first CD I was saying, "I would like to know the political and economic situation in France"! Try using that on the surly waiter when you want an expresso!
It's a fun course too. You're paired with male and female fellow learners on the recording and... well, let's just say they ain't too bright. The woman in particular. It's all part of the learning experience, of course, and you don't half feel stupid when you slip into the same mistakes as she does.
I like to think up backstories for them. He's the gardener of a mansion house whose new owners are French, and the lady of the house has her carnal eye on him. So she sent him to Michel Thomas so she can seduce him better in her first language. She's a failed actress who's married to a rich and successful businessman, but she believes that big break-through audition is just around the corner. But all she really does is drink coffee and smoke cigarettes (Gitannes, obviously) with her friends. And, judging by her accent, she recently went to America because she now speaks with an irritating half English/half American drawl.
After the recording the two of them hooked up for a brief but highly-polished liaison. She liked him simply because he was young and not her husband, and he liked her because he finally found somebody dumber than he is.
But I digress.
The best part about this course is that it's logical. You're taught the basic words to construct sentences, and then told to do so. It's not the case that words and sentences are simply thrown at you, with the hope that some will soak into your thick skull. As Thomas says, once you've got the basics down pat, it's mostly a matter of learning new words.
All it requires is an hour of your time each evening. That's harder to manifest than it sounds. Even if you have the time, spending an hour in a room talking to yourself isn't entirely fun. So while the course itself might not take effort (Thomas tells us not to think but simply to listen), finding the time to listen isn't so easy.
Incidentally, if Miss James (my French teacher 1984-89) is reading this then I'm interested if you are. You were a fine looking woman back then and I'll bet you still are. Sorry about not reading the signs when we were in the stockroom. I was a bit naive back then. I only realised what you meant years later.
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