Do you want to be able to express yourself in Spanish with confidence and fluency?
Insider's Spanish offers a local perspective on Spanish culture, opinions and language use so that you can speak confidently on today's most important and relevant topics.
This intermediate Spanish conversation course, devised for all intermediate-level learners or those following on from Total or Perfect Spanish, will advance your overall fluency, listening comprehension and conversation skills, expand your vocabulary and improve your grammar.
Through authentic, lively conversations around engaging topics, and the unique Michel Thomas Method for learning, this course focuses on the colloquial language and conversation strategies used by native Spanish speakers so that you can fit in and communicate more naturally.
Michel Thomas, the preeminent language teacher, always said that learners start by mastering basic linguist structures (as in his Total and Perfect courses), which provide the bare walls of the house, but that that it was up to us, the learner, to decorate it in our own personal way. Insider's Spanish reflects Michel Thomas's 'Phase 2' courses that he and his team offered at his New York language school, allowing increased vocabulary, improved speaking, comprehension and reading and writing skills - the tools with which to decorate their houses.
Insider's Spanish includes:
· Twenty authentic conversations around a comprehensive range of subjects that reflect contemporary Spanish culture
· Language plus: conversation strategies, pronunciation and intonation to help learners express themselves naturally
· Listening and speaking practice to help learners progress to the next level
· Cultural insights into the unspoken rules of the language
This course includes a 100+ page book, MP3 audio CD-ROM, and interactive review and practice on CD-ROM.
Why is the Michel Thomas Method so successful?
The Michel Thomas Method draws on the principles of instructional psychology. Knowledge is structured and organised for the student so that you assimilate the language easily and don't forget it. The method deconstructs the language into building blocks that are introduced sequentially in such a way that the learner creates his/her response and moves on to ever-more-complex sentences.
Michel said: I will dissect everything into small parts and reassemble it in such a way that one will understand everything step by step.
He was also very clear about his ground rules: no memorisation, no drills, no homework; relax and leave off the anxiety normally associated with language learning.
Virginia Catmur grew up in a multilingual environment, and used her language skills working as a freelancer for various publishers. In early 2002 she met Michel Thomas while working for Hodder & Stoughton as a language editor - working alongside Michel in the studio, she edited his courses, and then managed the roll-out of the 'post-Michel' languages, commissioning and training other teachers who were similarly convinced by his Method.
Michel Thomas (1914-2005) had an amazing life. Born in Poland, he spent his early years in Germany and then in France, where he studied psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris. When war broke out, he fought with the Resistance and suffered imprisonment in labour camps. At the end of the war he joined the US liberation army and later settled in the US where he established his world-famous language school. Languages, being his strength and passion became the focus of the next 50 years of his life that he spent developing a method that he hoped would change the way we teach and learn - so that everyone could succeed. He developed this method 'that works with the brain'. After creating several courses of his own, he passed on his method so that other teachers might use it too.
