Foundation Swedish (Learn Swedish with the Michel Thomas Method): Beginner Swedish Audio Course

I have used the Michel Thomas approach to learning languages for many years now. It’s great that the approach is being made available for additional languages like Swedish.

Good points: it focuses on speaking above all else. As the primary aim of language learners is to communicate by speaking, this gives a good grounding. You simply listen, and when the teaches asks "how do you say....." you hit pause and compose your verbal response. It is that straightforward. After that, you have to listen to one of the two students giving their response. Bear in mind that on the earlier discs, the teacher clearly starts getting impatient when the students start asking questions instead of answering immediately.So here's a downside (although it depends on your stage of learning): it is at times painful to hear, not so much the mistakes (because we need to make those as part of the learning), but the (at times) awful pronunciation. The male student keeps over-stressing long vowels so that an "a" that should be pronounced "ahh" sounds more like "aww". The teacher, who is a native Swede, does not correct pronunciation of the word "hon" when they keep saying "huun" or "stor" when they say "stuur" (and numerous other words). The female student who is a slower, weaker student anyway, not only has an American accent to overcome, but she mangles the language even more. The constant poor pronunciation is really unpleasant to hear, over and over again.I do sympathise with those English speakers raised with strong native accents that actually impair the ability to acquire what is a new accent because they have to first "unlearn" their native accent. This is particularly noticeable with the more challenging sounds of Swedish and of course French. There is a chap with a strong south-east England accent on YouTube who has a similar problem where the native accent is prevalent in their Swedish.Having got to disc 8, it has definitely helped improve my verb construction and speaking. But as every language learner know, it fulfils only one of the 4 pillars of learning: speaking. So comprehension (listening and understanding), reading and writing are not covered. There is a pdf of very brief lesson notes available from the website so you can at least see how things are spelt. But that is the only reading there is. At this point, the teacher (who is a university professor apparently), is still coming across as overtly impatient with the students. I get the impression that he was doing this recording reluctantly and it was outside of his normal comfort zone of the lofty heights of academia. Furthermore, he could clearly not resist the temptation to lecture them on the finer points of grammar using grammatical terms of reference that most people do not understand like "subordinate clause", "subjunction", "preterite form" and then tersely and incompletely explaining word order when asked to. It was obvious that by this point, the students (including myself) were completely confused. Not a good place to be in the final hour of the course.One final oddity is a note on the packaging (a thin multi-folded card with slot pockets for each disc). It states that "if you know how to handle the verbs, you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary". Well in my experience, yes verbs are vital, but the statement oversimplifies the reality. Not least because of other factors like adverbs and adjectives that affect word order, object pronouns, different prepositions in different places and many other things in various languages. So don't believe any of the hype and advertising that this miraculously makes language learning effortless. It does not. And there is still no substitute for effort and hard work.Overall - worth doing as just one part of a structured approach to language learning using various resources. But brace yourself when the students speak and the teacher loses patience.

i have managed to download the booklet via a different server, not google, and can now re-adjust overall rating to 4

Very clear and concise. Teaching pace is rapid. Although the technique advises not to memories, it can be difficult to keep up.

Great way to learn any language.

Having now used the Michel Thomas Russian, Polish, Intermediate German and Advanced French series I can tell you this Swedish is simply the worst of the group, and perhaps any audio language learning I have ever used. As mentioned by another reviewer the accents of the two students (specifically the female) are maddenly bad. And, to make matters worse the teacher rarely even attempts to correct them.Therein lies the real problem with the Michel Thomas series - two students with a teacher. Invariably in all of the series, one of the students has very little language learning ability, let alone an ear for accents. I'm not sure where they got the female student for this, but she is truly dreadful. I'm not even talking mispronouncing complicated words. She continuously pronounces "har" like "whore" and "är" like "are". Those are just two examples of the many pronunciation mistakes she made, and she has zero (and I do mean zero) understanding of the simplest of grammar points. At times it's almost laughable and you just want to scream or throw your MP3 player at the nearest tree. The male student (who is also on the Polish series) is only slightly better - and that isn't saying much.The teacher is pretty pathetic. He rarely ever corrects pronunciation problems, nor does he even attempt to explain grammar - i.e., the definition of an infinitive. On disc 6 (out of 8) in translating "I want to do this" the female student literally asked "Do I need to translate the "to" (to do)? And the teacher responded "No, it's included." Say what? Where did they get this guy?There isn't much out there for Swedish so options are limited. Just be prepared to shake you head or scream at your headphones.