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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

Michel Thomas is the answer (or it was for me anyway as someone previously TERRIBLE at languages)

BBC made a documentary about him where he teaches a French gcse to the 6 worst kids in the school, in I think 2 weeks. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94A517B00A16C187&si=4eAv...

He was also in the French resistance, survived concentration camps and is generally a very interesting person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas

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His successor is https://languagetransfer.org, which is just a labour of love by a genius polyglot and language teacher.

So much so, in fact, that the owners of the Michel Thomas IP tried to sue him for stealing the methodology. The EFF, back when they actually did anything, shredded them.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/no-you-cant-pate...

Please check Language Transfer out and support him how you can.

I _loved_ Language Transfer when learning Greek. I haven't used it in many years, but at the time remember that I went from just being able to say "Hi" and "How are you" and "Good" to speaking full sentences with my boyfriend at the time in one day. And when visiting Greece later that year I could get by with strangers in everyday interactions easily. It was a mind-blowing learning experience, as someone who is not highly gifted in languages, and I donated to the LT creator.

Now I am learning Swedish. It has been taking me _way_ too long and unfortunately LT doesn't have a Swedish course. Looking at one of these documentaries about Michel Thomas it does indeed look like exactly that kind of approach! And I see he has a Swedish course. I'm excited to give it a try!

> Occupations Nazi hunter

Amazing

The other amazing thing is that all the recordings of him are done with two random people they just dragged in and did on the fly.

They seem so perfectly weighted and with exactly the right increase in difficulty that I assumed they must have been heavily edited / selected.

But basically he kept his methodology secret - literally locked in a safe - because he didn’t trust anyone after his experience in ww2.

It wasn’t until he was really old that someone convinced him to make the recordings. And the tapes are just that.

I have listened to many hours of the German course but the dynamic between the two students is distracting. They essentially play 'the genius' and 'the grouch'. The good one remembers everything. The bad one snorts and grumbles at every question. The acting is so forced that it completely breaks the immersion.

But I don’t think it is acting. He just only did one take. Usually someone is better then a the other. That’s what I understood from the documentary anyway. He just did the tapes because he was old and someone bugged him enough.

I tried to find a good article summarising Michel's language teaching method.

This references his tapes: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/learning-european-languages-m...

ChatGPT gave a reasonable looking answer to my prompt "Summarize what is special about how Michel Thomas teaches Language".

Maybe just another case of a highly intelligent person coming up with an "obvious" solution that is great: yet is not quite so obvious to others. He clearly was talented - but also he avoided explaining the rationale behind his method for years.

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