After the war Michel Thomas set up his world famous Language Schools in America where celebrities would pay thousands to learn a language from him. His client list is impressive and includes top business directors, actors and royalty. The reason Michel could charge so much was because he could deliver! He condenses many years of study into just a few short hours using his unique ability to shortcut and demystify the language with, sometimes, breathtaking simplicity. As he guides you along you are not aware of the quantity and complexity of what you are learning until at the end when you run through the Review lessons. Even the Foundation course of 8 hours will have you highly conversant in the language and able to communicate more fluently with native speakers. Michel is not big on 'Baby' words like "The dog is black" or "The car is blue" or any of the usual childish routines drilled into you by many language teachers. Michel focuses on more complex language like "If I had known you wanted to come and if you had told me you were going to be there I would have waited for you and we would have had dinner". Michel will have you forming complex sentences and switching tenses like a native. Tenses like the subjunctive are taught in less than five minutes by simple manipulation of what you have been learning.

The Michel Thomas method uses two students who are new to the language and you are essentially the third student the group, suffering their mistakes and celebrating their successes. Michel Thomas is only featured on the French, German, Italian and Spanish courses. After he died in 2005 his colleagues applied the method to a whole range of other languages with high degrees of success. There is now a very large range encompassing all the European, Asian and East European languages. We have reviewed these under the relevant language page on this site.

Michel Thomas is your first stop when you are new to the language.