Spanish with Michel Thomas

Format: 8 hours of audio on CD or Audio Cassette.
Overall Rating: 4.5/5

This is the first thing I used when I began learning Spanish and I still really like how it teaches.

The audio has Michel Thomas as your teacher and you’re in a class with two other students. Michel teaches the students, having them respond in turn, and you simply pause the CD and try to respond as well.

I love the technique he uses because it focuses on building sentences and not the grammar. This makes it very easy to listen to and you learn a lot of things without realising it. By the end of the course you’re forming sentences automatically and it made learning verb tenses and irregular verbs quite easy. The constant repetition just makes it stick in your brain.

The one drawback is actually in its comprehensiveness. It covers all the tenses in only 8 hours and gets quite advanced quickly. I found myself needing to listen to most lessons more than once before I started to grasp the concept and new vocabulary.

The major advantage in the structure of this course is it encourages you to talk, in sentences, right from the beginning. I really like this approach and highly recommend this course as a starting point for learning a language.

There are also courses available in French, German, and Italian. In addition, there are further courses: Introductory Set (2 hours – first 2 hours of the 8 hour set); Language Builder (2 hours); and Advanced (6 hours).

Summary: Great course but expect to feel a little in over your head.