Michel Thomas – Review 2020

Have you ever put off learning a language because it seemed too hard or you thought you couldn’t do it? If so, the Michel Thomas language-learning program is designed for you. This audio-based program uses a relaxed teaching method in a low-stress setting. You listen to recordings of an instructor who teaches two students. Your role is to become the third student and follow along. There’s no homework or rote memorization. There aren’t even any written materials, except for an optional e-booklet. The program is great for beginners who want to develop a basic level of comfort in speaking a new language and earn some confidence, too. Whether Michel Thomas is one of the best language-learning programs for you largely depends on what kind of experience you want or need.

If it sounds too rudimentary for you, better options are Rosetta Stone ($36 for three months) and Duolingo (free), both of which earned PCMag’s Editors’ Choice. Those programs are better at teaching reading, writing, spelling, and grammar. They’re also suitable for anyone who is already at an intermediate or advanced level but still needs to practice their skills. Another good option for more advanced students is Yabla, which is kind of like a YouTube for language learning.

About the Name

Michel Thomas is named for the man who developed the program. His biography spans multiple countries and multiple wars. He’s something of a legend in the world of language learning. He was born in 1914, died in 2005, spoke multiple languages, survived imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps, and was a decorated war veteran in part for his linguistic ability to collect information in various languages. That said, some details of his military past have been called into question.

He later developed the Michel Thomas Method of teaching languages and opened a private school in 1947, teaching some of the biggest celebrities of the time. Eventually, his method became an audio-based program, which is what you can buy today.

In many of the language courses, Thomas himself is the instructor. He has an easily identifiable voice. You can learn more about him and hear his voice in a BBC video profiling his language instruction.

Languages Offered and Availability on Mobile

Michel Thomas offers programs in 18 languages. They are: Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Modern Standard), Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

To make sure you can access the programs you buy on both the website and the mobile apps, you need to download the right app. It’s called Michel Thomas Language Library for Android or Apple mobile devices. 

Hachette formerly had separate mobile apps for each language; do not download them. They haven’t been updated in ages, and they aren’t available for every language. Additionally, watch out for knockoffs, as they seem to come and go on the app stores. One way to make sure you’re getting the right app is to check the developer name. The Apple app is owned by Hachette UK and the Android version is offered by Trellisys.net.

Michel Thomas Pricing

When you buy one of the Michel Thomas language learning programs, you can spend about $7 for one lesson or $100 for a full course, which is about eight hours. Michel Thomas courses used to be sold as tapes and CDs, and you can still find some used CDs sold second-hand. Some languages have additional courses at varying prices, such as Insider’s French ($75), Italian Vocabulary ($75), Intermediate German ($90), and so forth. 

There are two ways you can buy a digital version of the courses. The first way is through the Michel Thomas website. You create a login for that site, buy the programs you want, and then you can either play the lessons on the site or use the same login on the mobile apps to download them to your device. 

The second option is to buy lessons on Audible. If you’re familiar with Audible and use it for audiobooks, this might be slightly easier and more convenient. As with any other audiobook you buy on Audible, you can download them or play them wherever you use Audible. When you purchase the lessons through Audible.com, they’re more expensive. They cost between $11 and $16 for each one-hour lesson, with no option to buy the full course at once. That means you end up paying as much as $128 for the eight-hour course.

Testing the Michel Thomas Method

To try the Michel Thomas courses, I went through the Foundation Arabic course. I also did the free introductory lesson in Italian and Hindi to see how the teaching differs from one language to another.

The program is entirely audio based, so you don’t learn to read or spell. You spend all your time listening, thinking, and speaking.

Each audio program has at least one instructor and two students. Italian is taught by Thomas himself. In the Arabic course, you have one qualified teacher who is not a native speaker, Jane Wightwick, plus a second instructor who is a native speaker, Mahmoud Gaafar. Wightwick drives the course and Gaafar clarifies pronunciation and sometimes chimes in with helpful suggestions.

The students, who during the recording were physically in a room with their instructors, are complete beginners. You’re the third student. You listen and are meant to respond any time the instructor asks a student to pronounce or come up with a word or phrase. You can always pause the audio while you try to answer aloud. Then you resume and listen as the student responds. The instructor sometimes offers corrections or clarifications. Finally, you hear one of the instructors say the answer correctly.

A real example in the Arabic course is, “In Arabic, how would you ask a man, ‘Can you see my son?'” Arabic uses gender in the language, so word endings change slightly when you speak to males versus females. At this point in the program, you’ve learned to say each word in this sentence, but you’ve never heard them or said them in this order before. You pause the app and try to say it. When you unpause, you hear the student make an attempt. Then you hear the instructor say the phrase in Arabic with a native pronunciation.

Learning With Michel Thomas

The Michel Thomas Method has unique aspects that make it completely different from any other teaching approach. When you start a new course, you get schooled in two rules before you even learn a single word of the new language. One has to do with using the pause button and speaking aloud. The other explains Thomas’ philosophy of your role as a student.

Your job is to be completely relaxed and to not try and force memorization. The course won’t give you any homework, and you aren’t supposed to review the material in between lessons either. “Let it be absorbed and internalized,” says Thomas.

What’s missing here is some guidance on how often you should listen to the audio files. Should I do one per day or several per day? Should I repeat a lesson if I’m struggling to answer all the prompts? A different audio-based language program, Simon & Schuster’s Pimsleur, has precise instructions for how often to do the lessons (exactly one per day) and when to repeat a lesson (if you didn’t answer correctly at least 80 percent of the time). Pimsleur is also audio-based, but there are no students on the audio recordings, the way there are in Michel Thomas. 

Building Blocks

The Foundation courses are meant to teach you functional language. Many language programs start by teaching you simple words such as “hello” and “goodbye.” Those are useful words, but they aren’t necessarily the best building blocks.

Instead, the Michel Thomas course gives you words that you can use over and over again in different contexts. In Arabic, you start with words such as “I,” “you,” and a couple of simple verbs. Throw in some borrowed words, such as “cola” and “sandwich,” plus a few high-frequency words, like “water” and “tea,” and you can quickly say, “I would like a sandwich and a tea, please.” Because of the way Arabic works, you can also say, “Would you like tea?” and about a dozen other simple sentences by swapping around the words you already know.

In Italian, it’s similar. You learn words for “it is,” “possible,” “to buy,” and more. By the end of the first lesson, you can say, “I want to buy it if it’s not too expensive,” and many other combinations of sentences using your new vocabulary.

How Fun Is the Michel Thomas Method?

In general, I enjoy learning through listening, especially the first time I’m learning a new language. I much prefer to hear a word and try to repeat it several times before I ever see how it’s written, as the spelling can sometimes trip me up. In that sense, I like the Michel Thomas lessons a lot.

I also like that the students are far from perfect. They get things wrong. They forget words that we just learned a few minutes ago. They struggle with some of the Arabic sounds that are unusual for English speakers. In that sense, they’re just like me, which puts me at ease.

That said, the first few minutes of the very first lesson are awful. The instructors go on and on about how you need to be relaxed, and if you’re not learning it’s their fault, not yours. When you finally get into the heart of the lesson, there’s a noise whenever you’re supposed to pause the audio. It’s a blaring beep in the Arabic course and quick tabla drum trill in the Hindi course. It’s annoying. Thankfully, the Arabic class drops it after a while.

The cuts for where one lesson ends and the next begins seem arbitrary. It sounds as if the lessons were recorded in one eight-hour session, and then later, a producer sliced it up into parts. Aside from the very first lesson, there are no introductions and no conclusions. It’s very rare that you stop and take stock of what you’ve learned, and when it does happen, it’s not necessarily at the end of a lesson. One lesson ends and the next one begins with the very next breath. It feels haphazard.

You can download a free PDF booklet to go with your lessons from the Michel Thomas website. If you use the website in combination with the mobile app, you’ll then have the option to download the booklets to your phone or tablet, too. The booklets contain a brief summary of what you learned in each lesson. For languages that use a non-Roman script, the writing is transliterated, so you won’t learn Arabic script or Cyrillic or Chinese characters.

What You Get

The Michel Thomas method has a few benefits. For one, it’s great for learning pronunciation. Second, you really have to work to retrieve words and concepts from your mind. Some language-learning programs use multiple-choice exercises extensively. In those programs, you aren’t being pushed to retrieve the word, but rather to remember something about it, like its first letter or whether it’s a short or long word. But Michel Thomas pushes you to recall each word that you need every time you use it.

I also find that translating is harder when done orally, compared with doing it in writing. So in this way, the benefit is that the program challenges you in a very specific way. When translating sentences on a screen, you can glance up at each word as often as you need until you translate them all. When translating orally, you don’t have that luxury. It takes more active thinking and remembering to get through a multi-part sentence.

The last benefit of Michel Thomas I want to mention is that it is a true confidence booster to people who believe they are incapable of learning a new language. It gets you speaking quickly, even if you are limited in what you can say.

With Michel Thomas, you practice figuring out what you do know how to say using the building blocks you’ve learned so far. That’s an effective strategy for building confidence in your abilities and for developing a foundation for a language. But it will only get you so far.

What’s Missing

As with any audio-only program, there’s no reading, writing, or spelling in Michel Thomas—or almost none, considering you can download a PDF booklet to go with the lessons. Keep in mind that for non-Roman alphabets, the text is transliterated. For a more interactive approach with a wider variety of types of instruction, you might instead (or additionally) try Fluenz, which offers many different ways to study, and includes reading and writing in its instruction.

In the Michel Thomas Foundation course, the instructors never ask you a question in the new language and expect you to hear it, understand it, and respond. I wish there were a little bit of that because hearing and understanding is necessary to be able to reply. But the method doesn’t use this technique. Instead, you’re only coached on putting together new sentences using words you’ve learned.

In the core program, you do get a little bit of grammar instruction, but not in a written form. For some languages, being able to see verb conjugations or other aspects of grammar can help adults learn it faster.

With Michel Thomas, I didn’t feel like I heard a lot of positive reinforcement from the instructors. I would have preferred a touch more enthusiasm when the students were able to answer prompts correctly.

Listen, Speak, and Boost Your Confidence

With any self-paced language-learning program, it’s important to have realistic expectations for what you will and won’t learn. Michel Thomas’ Foundation courses can help you develop a base for learning a language. You’ll acclimate your ear and your tongue, but you won’t learn to read or write. While you’ll learn highly useful words and build confidence in your ability to use them in different contexts, your vocabulary will still be severely limited. If you like this kind of education but want a bit more structure, you might enjoy Pimsleur more, as it gives you clear guidelines for when and how much to study.

Our overall Editors’ Choices for language learning are Rosetta Stone for paid instruction and Duolingo for free courses. When it comes to learning a language, keep in mind that it’s often helpful to use a few different resources at the same time. If you’re a beginner who needs some confidence, Michel Thomas might be worth a try. But don’t hesitate to add Duolingo or another app to move you along and fill in where Michel Thomas falls short.

Michel Thomas Specs

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