Michel, the man who'd like to teach the world to talk

By John-Paul Flintoff, Financial Times
Published: Mar 27, 2004

If we put our minds to it, we could all be multilingual. Or so says Michel Thomas, a Polish-born refugee, survivor of labour camps in Vichy France and agent of US counter-intelligence who founded a "Polyglot Institute" in Beverly Hills in 1947. He now runs Michel Thomas Language Centres in New York and California, and his tapes and CDs teaching French, German, Italian and Spanish are the best- selling language courses in the UK. After just eight hours of instruction, Thomas claims, beginners will have practical and functional use of whichever language they choose.

For £18,000 he will teach one-to-one and in-depth for three days, with a refund if you are not fully satisfied. He taught Grace Kelly French before her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Emma Thompson, the Oscar-winning actress, remembers learning Spanish with him as "the most extraordinary learning experience of my life - unforgettable". Woody Allen paid tribute to Thomas thus: "I had years of Spanish in school and could never speak a word [but] with Michel, you learn a language effortlessly." The list of other celebrity pupils is too long to repeat here, but clients include diplomats, archbishops, professors of business and executives from General Electric, McDonald's and Bertelsmann. The EU, hoping to raise awareness of its forthcoming elections, recently sent a trainload of journalists to Brussels and paid Thomas to teach them Spanish on the way.

His teaching method, which took him a quarter of a century to refine, is sufficiently unusual to have been granted a patent. In brief, it involves gradually building small phrases into longer sentences rather than whacking students with lists of vocabulary and grammatical terms. Meeting him in London, I ask what makes this process so successful. He takes time before answering in an accent that, rather like Arnold Schwarzenegger's, combines German with American. "There is nothing to memorise," he explains. "You are not allowed to take notes. And no homework. That is absolutely not allowed. Not even mental homework." Also: "If [students] make a mistake, that is fine. I will lead them back to correct their own mistake. I never correct them. The most important thing is not just to reduce but to eliminate all kinds of tension and anxiety that is associated with learning."

Thomas never particularly wanted to be a language teacher - only to devise better ways of teaching in general. He has frequently sought to interest the educational establishment in his methods, only to be rebuffed. Suddenly fierce, he jabs at my notebook: "I publicly challenge any university language department to do this. I will show that I achieve more in three days than they cover in two to three years. They never take me up on this! But it takes only three days to call my bluff - they could blow me out of existence!"

He has produced dramatic results in less elevated academies. In 1997, he taught a group of 16-year olds in north London who had been told they could never learn a language. One of their teachers, initially sceptical, said afterwards: "Very impressive... He's really on to something here." His techniques included explaining to the class that they already possessed a French vocabulary of some 3,000 terms. Most English words ending -tion, -able, -ence and -ism are the same in French.

Even more remarkable is an account in Thomas's biography, The Test of Courage, of the French lessons that he once gave at an inner- city school in Los Angeles. Thomas arrived to find police with attack dogs patrolling the grounds and a class of below-average students with violent tendencies. "But within two hours," writes his biographer, "Michel was helping any student who bothered to listen through such complex sentences as: 'If I had known you were coming to town this evening I would have made reservations for us at a restaurant and would have tried to get tickets for the theatre.'