Today I woke up to find a package with Michel Thomas Mandarin Chinese, the Foundation and Advanced (although I really don't like that they call it "advanced") courses. The Foundation has 8 CDs and the Advanced has 5 CDs.
For those who don't know, MT is an audio-only course, although it has a booklet with what is introduced in the tracks, that uses two students and usually one teacher, although it appears the Mandarin, Arabic, and Japanese courses also have a native speaker saying the words. The teacher asks the students to use a new word or expression in a sentence, and the student (usually one is quite adept and the other has some difficulties) says the sentence or phrase. The instructions say you should pause the CD when the teacher wants you to put a sentence together, but I always find I think and speak at about the same speed as the students, so I rarely pause.
I certainly don't think MT is the best course out there, but I actually want to do it regularly, which I think is the most important thing in selecting a language course. Michel Thomas offers courses in 12 languages, the only ones actually done by MT himself are the Spanish, French, German, and Italian courses, and many consider these the best in the series. Of the 8 courses that are taught by people other than MT, the Dutch course is considered the best, probably because Dutch has no grammatical cases. That is probably the biggest problem with the MT courses, it doesn't really teach cases. The German course has no cases, the Russian course seems to teach only the accusative case, and the Arabic, Greek, and Polish courses I don't know if they teach cases or not. The other 2 courses MT teaches are Portuguese and Japanese.
So to list all the MT courses, they are Spanish, French, Italian, German (the ones MT himself did) and Portuguese, Japanese, Mandarin, Greek, Russian, Polish, Dutch, and Arabic.
So far, I have the Spanish Foundation, Advanced, and Vocabulary Builder (many say the vocab course isn't that good, and I haven't tried it yet); the French and Mandarin Foundation and Advanced courses; and the German Foundation (why I didn't buy the Advanced course I don't know). Besides the German advanced course, I think I'll also get the Dutch Foundation and Advanced, but that won't be until well into the future. Like I said, I like Germanic languages. I don't know if I want to study Japanese or not, as I went back & forth on which one I wanted to learn, the original reason was that Japanese uses a syllabary as well as characters. Now I guess I'll learn Chinese.
Enough about Michel Thomas, let's get back to my least favorite topic: me! I honestly don't like talking about myself that much, as I think I'm rather dull. My last post makes me sound somewhat outgoing, as I like languages, a good subject for outgoing people, and that I wanted to go into birding for social reasons. Well, the truth is I'm actually very introverted, not to the point that I shun all social contact, but introverted enough that some very nice people who tried to start a conversation with me walked away frustrated because I didn't know what to say to them. That may not be introversion, that may just be me being socially inept.
Anyway, enough for now. Thanks for reading.
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