Original playout date: 14 September 2007
Duration: 15:01
After the 7/7/07 meeting, which was shown on an earlier video (I’ll make this a video response to that one) we went back to our friends from Berlin who had invited us to stay and they showed us – and via camera you the viewers – around the much changed and ever interesting city of Berlin by road.
This probably has one of the highest number of languages in it as we are speaking English, German and Russian and then there is Schuberts Heidenroeslein in Japanese, selected as this is a song the German version of which is a party piece sometimes delivered by our dear friend Dr Peter Heinemann, featured here, when in the right mood. Continue reading “Berlin evening with friends”→
1st edition (publ. Hodder & Stoughton) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) – But will Hodder and Stoughton manage to make Michel Thomas’ method everlasting?
Neworldgirl78 wrote on my Goldlist lecture in Moscow film the following question:
I am learning Russian and have been using a variety of means such as Pimsleur, various apps, and your you tube videos of course. Should I narrow my studying to this method or add it to my current methods? Thanks, and love your videos 🙂
Many thanks!
I started to answer this in the comments section but I thought that it needs more space than the comments section there allows.
Here’s the full answer:
I use Michel Thomas and Pimsleur myself, audio only as they are, at the beginning of learning a new language, but they eventually come to an end. You might for example work through MT first and even a very long course with all the available levels in still is only less than 20 hours of material, add on a full Pimsleur course with another 30 hours of material (much of it overlapping with the MT) that gives you 50 hours.
This 50 hours – the maximum currently available of quality audio-only beginners courses – when listened to a few times gives you 150 hours of audio time at the max, and if you use the pause button properly you could stretch that to 250. It’s great to do this at the beginning – use MT first as that method gives you the deep structures of the language and doesn’t shy away from grammatical explanations (which Pimsleur does to the point that it becomes misleading at times) and it gives you a good accent, but that 250 hours of work will only take you so far.
And let’s be clear that for many of the less popular languages there’s still no MT course – Hodder and Stoughton didn’t make much on the ones available so far as the activities of internauts were too impactful on the sales of the material, and so it may well be down to hobbyists rather than businesspeople to take Michel Thomas’ legacy to its full conclusion. So it the best case, something like Russian, you might be lucky and find 250 hours of useful work to do on audio only. If you were looking at Bulgarian you’d be hard pressed to find any – I found some in bookshops in Sofia, from an unknown method and author which I didn’t even start yet, but nothing on Amazon or the net.
Guido Westerwelle - a politician whose remarks are only to be discussed in abtraction from politics, on how-to-learn-any-language.com!
I am repeating here a few comments I made about the Gothic Language on How-To-Learn-Any-Language forum some time back. As I am now not posting there owing to their heavy-handed moderation policy ( I was censured for discussing politics in a thread about why a certain German politician – Guido Westerwelle the Foreign Minister no less, refused to speak German at an international press conference because it happened to be held in Germany.
I am looking forward to the Eurovision Song Contest this year – instead of being done in French and English as per the tradition, as Lena won it for Germany last year (with a song that has not even been given any lyrics in German and is sung in Essex English by someone trying to impersonate Lily Allen but who is at any rate a good deal hotter than Lily, and that of course is what the Eurovision is all about these days…) it will have to be held entirely in German to appease Westerwelle’s nationalist complexes!
Anyway, it was for taking an anti-Westerwelle line that I got censured in HTLAL. I warned that if moderated I would simply leave and stop contributing and at that the moderator called my bluff and pulled the whole thread! In case anyone thinks that it means that I am spitting my dummy out and walking away like a big kid, let me explain the following points:
1. I have very limited time to post and type on the internet. Thankfully I have the pleasure and privilege of a small following of people who like to read my things or watch or listen to my multimedia outputs, and so I have the impetus always to continue. Even on How-To-Learn-Any-Language.com I enjoyed the privelege of popularity – not that many posters have received over 1,5 times the votes compared to the posts they have made. Many people have more than the 139 votes I received, but these are folk who usually have hundreds of posts and not just 87. If it were not for the fact that I know many people like to follow what I do, at some times of year it would all stop as I get just too busy. Continue reading “The Mystery of Gothic and why I left How-To-Learn-Any-Language.com”→
Production date: 18 June 2006
Playout date: 18/6/2006
Camera: Logitech webcam
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker with effects
Location: Home.
He’s back. The Count Sproey von Weytzentrenner with his unmitigated gloating over the success of Germany in the first part of World Cup 2006. I can’t believe that is already four years ago, I think the Count may be due for an new airing during this year’s World Cup in South Africa. Not only is he jingoistic about Germany, in football – also, he claims that Louis Armstrong is originally a German, and that the original of the song “What A Wonderful World” is in German.
In the German original, the singer hearing the babies cry, and watching them grow, takes comfort in the knowledge that one day he will be able to employ them in his factory.
