That documentary I linked to yesterday, in three parts starting here, is worth watching - 1997 (it seems) BBC documentary on his method. None of it will be surprising to anyone who has tried using the Michel Thomas Method CDs that came out afterwards, but apparently the Method was very much a secret back then. Startled to see Leo Marks, cryptographic maven for the wartime Special Operations Executive, chipping in with praise. (Marks's memoir Between Silk And Cyanide is one of the very best books I've ever read). Thomas is pickier than most British teachers would be on the matter of pronunciation, but then he has to be - nobody's writing anything down so the sounds are all that anyone has. I'm embarrassed that I've tried and failed a few times to learn the IPA and understand that two-dimensional chart you put the vowels on, but to me languages really means books, not sounds. And avoiding French orthography saves you a lot of time and worry; far too much of my school French was taken up with getting verb endings right that in fact all sound the same; they're just spelling rules of no interest if you're trying to get to conversational competence.
Someone will eventually 'gamify' language learning successfully and make a fortune out of it. As someone who loves maths but dislikes combinatorics it always astonishes me that people who 'hate numbers' (their own words) can get pleasurably addicted to hardest-possible Sudoku. There's a lot of psychology about challenge and feedback and sense of achievement that's only being uncovered right now in the games industry.
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