Which Language Course Is Best: Michel Thomas Or Pimsleur?

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I finally got around to checking out the Michel Thomas course for Spanish after getting many recommendations from readers. The audio course is a recorded classroom instruction done by the late Michel Thomas, a Polish borne linguist and World War 2 adventurer.

His talent comes in breaking down the language into component parts and then providing simple rules and mnemonics to help you remember. For example, his “nose rule” for Spanish tells you that you should stress the second-to-last syllable in Spanish words that end with n, s, or a vowel. I’ve been studying Spanish for a while and never was taught a rule to remember the stress. His course is like an audio version of Madrigals Key To Spanish book, which I found to be extremely  intuitive and practical.

I was initially skeptical to learn Spanish from Michel since he’s not a native speaker, but his insistence on mastering pronunciation helped me more than learning from actual native speakers. His method strongly focuses on clarity, something I desperately needed as women have often told me that my Spanish sounds “robotic” because of not enunciating the vowels. I quickly got used to Thomas’ accent and enjoyed his soothing, paternal coo.

The Thomas course is a mixture of instruction and call-and-response, unlike Pimsleur which is solely call-and-response. I understand the Pimsleur argument that if little kids don’t need to be taught grammar rules then you don’t either, but we’re not little kids. Telling an adult a rule can make him understand the language a lot faster, so I’ll have to give Thomas’ course an edge in helping you understand the nuts and bolts of the language.

Pimsleur courses aim to burn the rules into your head unconsciously, but it kills you not to know the rules. Adults need to know the why. Thomas helped me clarify the basic rules of Spanish that I should’ve already known.

Pimsleur does have an advantage in that it teaches you more touristy phrases that help you get by in a country from day one while Thomas focuses on casual conversation. Another positive with Pimsleur is that it gives you a lot more vocabulary, especially verbs (Thomas focuses only on a dozen verbs). While the Thomas course gives you a better understanding of the words you do know, it was much too limited to speak at length. I also liked the more structured approach to Pimsleur that forced you to stay alert the entire time. Sometimes during a long-winded Thomas soliloquy I lost attention and dozed off until I was forced to come up with an answer.

From this point on I’m going to recommend you do Pimsleur first in order to get around in the language (in taxis, restaurants, ticket offices, etc), and then Michel Thomas to aid you in real conversation with women. Since both courses are extremely helpful, I don’t see them as competitors but synergistic tools when learning a language through audio. If your goal is to master a language in the shortest amount of time, doing both is the way to go.

Read Next: This May Be The Fastest Way To Learn A Language 



About the Author

has been blogging for several years over at RooshV.com about travel and women. He has also authored books on how to get laid in the United States, South America, and Eastern Europe. He launched Return Of Kings in October of 2012 to serve the needs of masculine men.

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  • John Galt2

    Roosh – what kind of time commitment is needed for these courses? Is there an iPad app for both?

    • Roosh

      Both can be found in MP3. You can load the files on your phone.

      One unit of Pimsleur is 15 hours. The major languages have three units (45 hours total). You will likely have to do each lesson twice, so that’s a 100 hour time commitment. If you’re a newbie language learner, you may have each lesson 3 or 4 times.

      Michel Thomas is much shorter. Their entire Polish course is 12 hours. Again, you have to repeat each lesson at least once.

      Don’t be mistaken: these aren’t shortcuts, but they do give you a good language foundation to supplement notecards and other book resources.

  • Anonymous

    Neither. srs like anki and native materials as well as watching and listening to native content is what you need.

    • Roosh

      And how much speaking practice do those give you? Zero. Great strategy if you plan on reading instead of talking.

      • Anonymous

        Speaking comes naturally when you’ve listened to enough native materials. Look up antimoon.com. Bunch of polish dudes learned English to fluency and you can even hear then speak with no accent (which if you know polish people you would think would be an impossibility)

      • Yurij

        It’s simple, you search for native speakers in your area. If you can’t, you switch to Skype.

  • chris

    Do you have any input on Rosetta stone? I have downloaded it for free but I keep hearing mixed reviews.

  • K

    I’ve never tried Michel Thomas, but I have tried Pimsleur for Mandarin, Italian and Greek. I don’t know if it’s because I learned two language at a young age, or just the way my brain is wired, but I can learn the rules of the language just from following the Pimsleur lessons. This worked for Mandarin and Greek quite well. It’s not fair to compare Italian because one of my first languages, Spanish, is very similar to Italian, so I was able to figure out Italian very easily.

    Without knowing more about Thomas, I would have to recommend starting with Pimsleur and then moving on to Thomas if you don’t seem to be able to pick up the rules or maybe even another teaching method. I’d be interested to hear about other people’s experiences and what worked best for them, especially in the context of their previous language experience.

  • http://www.thesolomonpress.com Samuel

    I just got the full 5 disc set of Rosetta Stone. Not sure how it measures up, but it was free, so I’ll take it.

    I love Spanish, and wish to master it. I’d like to think that any of these programs, combined with immersion, would help a guy make a lot of progress. If I could just get to a proficient level, I think I could read Spanish material in general in order to complete the process.

    If I can accomplish the immersion part, I’ll be having fun either way

  • Doggo

    I tried Pimsleur Eastern Arabic Level 1. To this monolingual English speaker Arabic seemed a strange and difficult language, but I was reasonably pleased at how much of it I was able to pick up. While hardly fluent, I’m off to a decent start.

  • Torsten

    Thomas worked best for me.

  • Uncle Elmer

    I used Pimsleur Mandarin and Vietnamese. Highly recommended. Astonishes natives when you use even a little on them.

    Struggled also with “Modern Spoken Cambodian”, which I think is free now on the web. Often I think natives just don’t expect you to speak their language. When I left Cambodia the last time I left the book in a hotel, having defaced it to say “Modern Broken Cambodian”. Not unusual to meet uneducated people in border areas who speak 4 languages, Viet, Khmer, Chinese, and English while educated western guys like me can’t even order a bowl of noodles. In “Hue” I was at a viet-only restaurant and they struggled to take my order, then brought me a whole fucking chicken. I ate it like that is what I wanted.

    At my wife’s home they produced a Khmer woman and I spoke to her in Khmer. She smiled politely and left. Later they tole me she said she did not understand what I was saying. Really I should practice viet with my wife, who herself studies English diligently every day. Eventually we will move back there and I should have some ability, but difficult for a flat-toned midwesterner to get those tones right for them to understand. Anyway, thanks to Pimsleur I can say “I speak a little Vietnamese, but not very well”. Always good for a hearty laugh.

    Also my wife says the Foreign Service Vietnamese is too “northern” and won’t help me with it.

    Sir Richard Francis Burton said the best place to learn a language was in bed with a woman.

  • Dave

    Michel Thomas method seems like a well kept secret at times. I’m surprised it took me so long to discover it.

    It’s the only system that has really worked for me, after trying 4 or 5 others, including classes – all of which I usually gave up due to waning motivation. MT always keeps me excited to be learning and making progress.

    I hate memorising phrases and words, exam studying style. There is something more natural about MT.

  • KK

    I recommend Assimil courses. They are a great introduction to form a solid base (pronunciation,1000-2000 words, main grammatical points, etc) . Each course has around 100 lessons, so you can complete it in 3 months on a normal pace. After that you can move to bilingual texts (Internet is great for this), subtitled video material , songs, etc and try your first conversations with native speakers since you have the basics well drilled.
    A very rough guideline to reach a decent level in 6 months would be:

    2 months Assimil (Or FSI which is free) to get an excellent foundation.
    2 months of using native material (read 3-4 novels, watch 40 movies, read newspapers articles daily)
    2 months of active use of the language (chat, forums, phone, picking up chicks)

  • http://www.politicallyincorrectnovel.com Ari

    I recommend Super-Memo for learning languages. At least as a supplement to any of the above. It’ll have the same effect on your learning as steroids would on your physique. See: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak

  • Debbie

    I really don’t understand these positive comments about the Michel Thomas method because I found it to be the absolutely worst audio language course I’ve ever heard. I already speak Spanish just not totally fluently and someone had given my husband the Michel Thomas cds for learning Spanish and I was curious about them so I started listening to them.

    He starts off almost immediately with having his students over-stress the stressed syllables and at first I thought that this was just to get them to understand where the stress occured and once they understood it, he would have them pronounce things properly. But he kept at it, getting more extreme with each lesson and I felt immensely sorry for the poor students who were trying to learn Spanish and instead were being brow-beaten repeatedly if they didn’ pronounce “puedo” like “puEEEYdo”. Nobody talks like that – in any language. So I skipped ahead to the last lesson thinking perhaps he’d stopped this insane forcing of ridiculous pronounciations but, alas, no he hadn’t he was still harping on about the “push” and making the students pronounce the verbs in this unpleasant and unnatural way. I don’t see how anyone could learn much of anything except how to pronounce verbs in this laughable manner because this makes up about 50% of what the tapes are about.

    There are all sorts of good audio language courses available on the web these days. Don’t make the mistake of trying the Michel Thomas course. If you’re like me, you’ll end up just wanting to slap him and tell him to snap out of it, then throw the cds in the bin.

    • Matt Stand

      I think you missed the point with the stress. He exaggerates it ad absurdum as a training aid. He isn’t telling the students that Spaaaaanish speaaaaaakers taaaaalk liiiiiike thiiiis. We would never learn pronunciation and accent if we didn’t mimic and exaggerate those aspects least familiar to us. Do you talk to a baby/toddler in a normal mumble? Or would you exaggerate corrections to aspects of pronunciation/grammar that they get wrong to help highlight the improvements?

      Also, If you already speak Spanish, don’t listen to a beginners Spanish course!

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