In the News
Brush up your bad language
(Sunday Telegraph, January 7, 2003)
Britons abroad usually end up shouting at the locals
in English.
But Clare Wrathrall has found a way to sound like a native...
This is the season of resolutions, and along with quitting smoking,
learning a language is surely up there as one of the most popular.
We may be a nation of hopeless linguists, with neither the opportunity
nor the inclination to learn languages -- since 1992, the number taking
French A-level has declined by a third -- but when traveling, attempting
to communicate in the local language, however clumsily, can transform
your experience.
Speaking the local language, however, can be harder than it sounds.
French, Spanish, Italian, even Portuguese may have familiar Romance
roots. But Czech? Of the three million tourists who visit Prague each
year, how many manage a "Na shledanou" (goodbye)
or "Dekuji mockrat" (thank you very much)? And
as for the Dutch and Swedish . . . well, their English seems better
than most Britons'.
Last autumn, inspired by a row with a Mexican hotel receptionist over
our room, I resolved to learn Spanish properly. This wasn't
the first time. I have shelves groaning with Teach Yourself Spanish,
Get by in Spanish, Colloquial Spanish, Spanish for Travelers, all
of them abandoned, along with their Italian and German equivalents.
I am a veteran of four terms' local-authority Italian evening classes
-- too slow; too mixed ability; once a week wasn't often enough; and
they're quite hard to combine with a social life. Books and lessons
obviously weren't working. Perhaps what I needed was an audio course.
"This is great and really works," the assistant
in Waterstone's [a major book store chain in the UK] enthused
as I handed over £60 for the eight-CD Spanish with Michel
Thomas language course. It felt like a major outlay, but the expense
was all part of making a commitment, I told myself.
Thomas, who looks every inch a showman, claims that 10 to 12 hours
is all you need to acquire a practical knowledge of a language,
"achieved without memorizing or learning by rote, without drill,
without textbooks, without taking notes and without homework."
His audio courses come stamped with effusive recommendations from
Emma Thompson and Woody Allen, and he has taught umpteen members
of Hollywood's A-list, from Barbra Streisand to Warren Beatty via
Mel Gibson, not to mention Bob Dylan, Eddie Izzard and any number
of US diplomats.
It is, however, a fallacy to think that you can absorb
a course through listening while driving or ironing. It's important
to concentrate fully; to respond to the questions aloud; and to
rewind and revise where necessary. But play by Thomas's rules, and
you feel an extraordinary sense of progress from the start as you
begin to construct sentences that might actually be useful. There's
no tiresome role-playing or messing about with fatuous phrases pertaining
to la plume de ma tante or lightning-struck postillions.
This is partly thanks to the similarities between Spanish and English,
which have more than 2,000 words in common, give or take an ending.
Thus, says Thomas, you "can immediatamente transformar
su vocabulario ingles into Spanish". For instance, words
in English ending -ible, -able or -ion are approximately the same
(except in terms of pronunciation); those ending -ent or -ant just
take an e - and so on.
All of which is instantly encouraging "especialamente
if you considera how limitado our vocabulario activo,"
says Thomas, who later explains that "our everyday language
uses only about 600 words." He also makes great use of mnemonics
and other tricks. Olvidar, to forget, he points out, has the same
root as oblivion. How to remember the future tense of "to be"?
Que sera sera, of course. Think Doris Day. "I taught
her," he remembers wistfully.
If most language teaching is about accuracy, grammar and
some sort of precarious authenticity, Thomas's emphasis is on being
understood and sounding confident. Mistakes don't matter as long
as you learn from them.
I was skeptical about his method and its efficacy. Especially
at his insistence that you should "never to try to remember
or review what you've learnt, but let it be absorbed and internalized
to become knowledge. For what you know you won't forget." And
even having done the course, I can't quite believe I've retained
anything, though in principle I've mastered the present, past and
future tenses, as well as the imperative and conditional, and any
number of useful idiomatic expressions. But whenever I revisit the
CDs, the required responses seem to come instinctively.
Of course, the real test will be my next visit to somewhere Spanish-speaking.
And my worry is that without Thomas's hypnotically flirtatious voice
to prompt me with questions and will me to answer them, I'll be
tongue-tied. But I'm quietly optimistic. El Pais is suddenly intelligible.
And I've even managed to translate for a couple of Spanish tourists
who asked me falteringly for directions in London. Quizas hablo
un poco espanol despues de todo.
'Spanish with Michel Thomas' is published by Hodder & Stoughton,
£60, from all good bookshops. Courses in Italian, French and
German are also available.
You too can talk like Thomas
'Actually I never wanted to be a language teacher," Michel
Thomas tells me by telephone in fluent yet unexpectedly careful
English from his home in New York. His voice is reassuringly familiar
from the audio course, his faintly Middle European accent impossible
to place. But then this is a man who is Polish by birth, has a French
name, has lived in the United States since 1947 and speaks 11 languages,
six of which - English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Yiddish
- he still teaches.
Born Moniek Kroskof in Lodz just before the First World War, Thomas
grew up in Germany and fled to France in 1933. "My own history
of the Second World War involved two years in concentration camps
and slave labor camps . . . and being tortured," he tells me.
He escaped to fight with the Resistance, subsequently serving in
the US Army's Combat Intelligence Division and as a US Army Counter
Intelligence Corps agent. It is an incredible story. So extraordinary,
in fact, that it's the subject of a libel suit he is bringing against
the Los Angeles Times, which questioned the veracity of some of
his more remarkable claims.
"After the war," he says, "I decided to devote my
time, my life, to probing the learning process of the human mind.
And for that I decided to choose the most alien subject of learning,
which is a foreign language."
He arrived in Beverly Hills in 1947 and set up the Polyglot Institute
on Rodeo Drive - the name was later changed because "nobody
seemed to know what polyglot meant". In 1958 he took part in
an experiment with Aldous Huxley's wife, Laura, to see if LSD, which
was then legal, could aid the learning process; he concluded it
couldn't.
Although Thomas says it took him "26 and a half years"
to perfect his method of language teaching, he has never been short
of celebrity students. He taught Grace Kelly French on the set of
High Society in 1956 in preparation for her marriage to Prince Rainier.
And the Italian-born film star Yves Montand learned English from
him on the set of the Marilyn Monroe film Let's Make Love, in 1960.
The film director Franois Truffaut, reckoned "his manner is
like that of a psychoanalyst".
Though he is now writing a book about how we learn, he cannot,
or is unwilling to, explain how his method works beyond that his
intention is to "make use of the full potential of the human
mind by combining the conscious and unconscious". Whatever
the method, the evidence is that it does work. Although the Michel
Thomas Language Centers charge $25,000 (around £16,650) for
three days' personal tuition, no one has ever taken up the offer
of a full refund for students unhappy with the results.
Maybe 2003 will be the year I learn German.
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