German Vocabulary Builder+: with the Michel Thomas Method

Very good instructor and the Michel Thomas method is very helpful, but works best if you have a bit of a basis in the language first. I think if you know a bit you can use this to quickly build out and expand your knowledge and familiarity. You get insights into the construction of words, the components that come from other words. Very helpful to making sense of German vocabulary. Ms. O'Dowd is a very good and enthusiastic instructor.

the recording quality is very poor. Especially between the Students. Michel Thomas is very clear. But the students all sound like mickey mouse.

second CD didn't play, I was hoping for something different. I wrote to Amazon for a refund, but have not heard back.

Loved it

I've recently completed the ENTIRE German course by Michel Thomas. The results are nothing short of incredible! (By the entire course I refer to all 'sub-courses': Start, Total, Perfect, Masterclass). At many points along the way there's a substantial sense of accomplishment. First, when finishing the first 2 hours of the course, you are already familiar with several sentence structures. By the end of the Total course, You reach a point where you have a solid grasp of basic to intermediate sentence structures, and by the end of the Perfect course you get a very firm grasp of all sentence structures in use, being able to both understand sentences in German, and construct your own, no matter how complex they may be. It took me around 70 hours of listening, spread over 3.5 months to finish the courses, mostly listening to the recordings while driving! By 70 hours I refer to the time I spent on the courses, which includes pausing the recordings, rewinding, etc. No homework was required, no extra work of any kind. Note, as you'll often read in reviews of the method, Michel's accent in the 4 languages he taught was far from native-like. However, this poses little to no problem. This is because he does put an emphasis on pronunciation key points, which, if mastered, allow you to be perfectly understood. To further help with pronunciation, on the segments that focus on vocabulary, you have native German speakers, who read in German the sentences you are asked to translate from English. So, in conclusion, I highly recommend courses by Michel Thomas!

I like the Michele Thomas method, but I LOVE it when Marion O'Dowd teaches it! She is much easier to understand and has a quick and clever way of getting loads of vocabulary and grammar across painlessly.

I like the method very much, and it's really rich in vocabulary. But maybe it's TOO rich in vocabulary! I'll have to listen a 100 times to memorize. hahaha But it's really nice, i recommend!

Bought this as some extra practice for my mother who is learning German with the Michel Thomas Method. She says it's great - the vocabulary just sinks in much faster without spending hours learning by rote and her passive vocabulary has also increased thanks to this set.

Great learning resource

There is one problem. The CD is in MP3 format which runs on my laptop ok but an ordinary CD player cannot read MP3s. which means it is necessary to convert from MP3 to audio CD.

Other review misleading. There is one audio CD and one CD for computer. The technique is great and having done no German for 30 years it still makes perfect sense. Goes at a steady pace with lots of hints on grammar & sentence construction. Wish I'd got this years ago!