I learned French and Spanish in high school in Canada, then studied both these languages in university. This helped me to learn English grammar and to learn other languages at a basic level. I’ve learned a few languages for travel or for professional reasons (though not necessarily retained much).
I have used various books, tapes and discs and computer programs to learn a basic language. And I bought a bunch of Michel Thomas discs cheaply for my library but didn’t really use them.
For no real reason, I decided to listen to the beginner Mandarin Chinese discs. I was impressed how well things like tones and basic sentence structure were taught. There is (not yet) much vocabulary or complexity, but it seems much more useful than, say, Duolingo which never did much for me.
I wonder if more experienced linguists who learned a second language have any thoughts (apart from immersion)?
Not an experienced linguist, but I did his French CDs and was amazed how far they got me. I was well into my 40s when I went through them, and they took me much farther in conversational French than all my elementary and high school French. He has a way of making it very intuitive and getting around the complexities.
I’ve gone through the first series or two of his French courses…his gimmick seems to be teaching you to string things together to create complex sentences relatively quickly, which definitely builds confidence, but of course those few hours of lessons are just the starting point for the many hundreds of hours of intensive practice (interacting with others!) it takes to really learn a language.
The Michel Thomas method is very good and I note that many audio language courses now copy it (or he copied them, whatever). It’s much more effective than just listen and repeat.
However, I personally find the courses not taught by Michel himself (R.I.P.) to not be of the same standard. In the Mandarin course there are a few unnecessary oversimplifications of the grammar that will cause confusion. He’s not strict enough with the students’ very poor pronunciation. And his mnemonics are really weird; there’s at least a couple that don’t work – you would need to remember the word in Chinese first for the mnemonic to make sense.
And they only go to a very rudimentary level (which, to be fair, the Mandarin teacher himself acknowledged on his blog; he was dead against the publisher using the word “Advanced” for any part of the course).
After Michel Thomas I recommend continuing with Pimsleur.
I found his Spanish course really useful to get me started - in particular, the way he starts by linking words that are very familiar and similar in both languages - it generates a nice layer of comfort at the start, which helps a lot when things get more difficult.
I never took it much further than about halfway through the course, but I feel like that was enough to enable me to function in shops, restaurants etc when visiting the country.
I’ve also gone through his Russian course and have almost completed (Egyptian) Arabic and Foundation Hindi. Yes, they get you thinking independently with a decent knowledge of sentence structure. The languages vary quite a bit on how much vocabulary they include, and how much time is spent on past and future and conditional tenses, depending on how difficult these are.
I wish they’d come out with more. I really like the Hindi course so far — it uses the MTM but pushes the vocabulary quite quickly too.