I was wrong. I have used two sets of Michel Thomas tapes, this one (for a holiday in the Marche region, where we didn't meet many people who spoke english), and the Spanish set (for a holiday in the Sierra de Aracena in western Andalucia, where again there were very few english speakers).

In both cases, I was congratulated by both native speakers and by anglophones for my clear natural grasp of the language.

The downside of the approach is that you have very little vocabulary (you're basically dependent on loan words, which admittedly in a Romance language gives you a pretty good set, assuming you've got a good english vocabulary). Also there's no written component at all, so you have to learn that from scratch. Otherwise the course is at least as good as a year of evening classes - probably a bit better, because you can go through the course twice.

Of course, when you work out that a year's evening classes actually add up to maybe 18-20 hours, the 8 hours of the CDs begins to look less astounding.

Thomas' approach is to give you lots of practice in composing small sentences, gradually complicating the constituent structure of the sentences until you suddenly discover that you've just said a very long and complicated sentence. The exact example sentences he uses, by the way, appear to be identical on the differnet courses. I already speak German and French, but I'd be interested to know if that's true of them too.

He puts a lot of emphasis on getting little elements of stress and pronunciation correct, so that you are naturally more confident from the start. There's also a lot of stress on useful pronouns (like cosa/cosi in this case) which get you over worrying if you don't know the name of something.

The pedant in me picked up one nagging mistake (as far as I casn tell, and it's too late to correct now, since Thomas diend in Jan 2005): He did not appear to be aware of the distinction in English of will/shall (where if I will do something I want to do it but might not be able to, whereas something that shall happen is definitely going to happen, whether I want it to or not): all his talk about the future tense used the "will" form. Mind you, that's probably beyond a certain percentage of native speakers, too.

In the end, recommended.


Michel Thomas's Advanced Italian Course   November 19, 2004
 74 out of 74 found this review helpful

The Michel Thomas method is designed to teach the underlying structure of the language and to make it possible for the student to produce complex sentences; but, unlike a conventional course as used in most of our schools, it won't equip you, for example, to order goods in a shop or a meal in a restaurant. The latter, however, is little more than a question of vocabulary and the Thomas method is the best way I have seen so far of inculcating in students the skills and knowledge which normally only the best achieve. He flies in the face of conventional wisdom and uses, not the target language, but English, as his vehicle of instruction, and concentrates on teaching grammar by breaking down the problems into bite-sized bits and relentlessly questioning the students so that they are forced to think about what they are saying. He thus gives his students a more solid foundation on which to build than the topic-orientated methodology prevalent in schools today. It might be good to see some schools leavening the latter with elements of the Thomas-style approach to grammar learning.

The advanced course has the virtues of the eight-hour beginners' course but, unlike its predecessor, it tries to fit in too much and makes greater demands on the patience of the student sitting at home than the publicity would seem to indicate. Matters aren't helped by the fact that one of the two students being instructed on the recording clearly already knows a great deal of the stuff that is being taught, and this encourages too fast a pace in places. Of course, use of the pause button to give time for thought is an important part of using the materials, but Thomas was producing tenses and persons of verbs at such a furious pace that I often couldn't get the answer even with a long pause. I therefore found it helpful to have some Italian verb tables in front of me and, when mental indigestion proved too much, to refer to them from time to time.

Despite all this, there is no doubt in my mind that Thomas is definitely on to something and, provided you are prepared to listen to the recordings a number of times and not to give up, you will learn the basics of all the tenses that you are likely to need in Italian, including the subjunctive.

To sum up - excellent, but not for the faint-hearted!

Richard Batstone