Free Michel Thomas CD - Italian, French, Spanish, Italian

sparky61

Received mine this morning too, how quick was that? I applied for Italian and received the French CD too.
:T

competitionscafe

Great find! I have the full French course (8 cd's) and it is the most effective way of learning I have tried - if you take the time to apply it and follow the instructions.

Although you may end up with a slightly odd pronounciation of certain words (komfotaaaaaaaaabble!) it won't be long before you can confidently ask people what kind of impression they have of the current economic and political situation in France - in French!

Middlestitch

Great offer - thank you!

dranz100

I think Michel Thomas' technique is good, but you need to back it up with something else. Here's my tip - it took me from O'level (over 20 years ago) standard to be able to converse with French farmers in about 3 months of a couple of hours per week - I think its the best language resource ever:

Go to https://www.tv4all.com
Choose a country. You now have a choice of various TV channels in that country. Try a few. What you're after is a channel / website that is of bbc.co.uk quality (this can take a while but is well worth the effort). Eg. for France I highly recommend https://www.tv5.fr. Then choose eg. a 10 minute-ish world news summary/magazine (not live TV), and watch that. (For TV5 I recommend "7 jours sur le planete", as this only changes once a week.)

Ok, so the first time you watch it you understand very little, but if its world news you'll know some of what they're on about. Try to grab onto one or two sentences and translate them slowly. But the key to it is repeatability. Watch it again and you'll understand a bit more. You'll glide over those sentences that you focussed on last time and so can focus on some different sentences. Perhaps pause, rewind & replay a short bit. Personally, if the news clip is > 10 minutes I only watch the first 10 minutes each time.

After a few goes you'll really feel like you're getting into what they're saying - you probably won't inderstand everything, but you won't be phased by full speed conversation.

Previously I had the common problem of knowing enough vocab to be able to ask a question, but being totally flummoxed by the reply, but after putting in some TV time was able to go to France and converse entirely in French - like magic!

Give it a try - its the best resource ever and its free!
Dz

poorbabe

Thanks Jmarko, ordered both French and Spanish CDs now.

Jo4

Thanks jmarko, ordered French and Spanish.

jmarko

Just as a quick aside, for those who want the rest of the course, the place to look is in your friendly neighbourhood charity shop (as they've normally been in a newspaper somewhere) and they are about 10p per disk! :j

scatz

grazie mille jmarko :beer:

nik2108

Thanks, just applied for mine

nickysue

I have just applied too. Thank you :T