Rocket Spanish vs Michel Thomas Spanish – Methodical Or Fast Spanish Learning, What Do You Need ?
January 15th, 2010
These two courses are quite hard to compare as they basically have completely different aims. Rocket Spanish is a complete course. There are components that teach a student reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. The Michel Thomas course is completely focused on the speaking and to some extent listening/comprehension.
To this extent, I think the Michel Thomas course is ideal for someone that wants to learn Spanish quickly (say they are on a vacation in Spain or on a Business trip in Mexico). Copy the CD’s to an ipod or mp3 player and off you go.
The format of the Michel Thomas Spanish course is Michel Thomas conducting a series of lessons (10 actually) with two students. Michel Thomas will discuss the topic of each lesson. He will ask questions and one or both of the students will answer the question. You are encouraged to pause the lesson just before the students answer and speak your own answer out loud. Then un-pause the lesson and see if you get the answer correct.
I like the way Michel teaches; he seems to give you confidence and simplifies the language. For example, he tells you that only a small portion of words are actually used on a day to day basis. So if you understand these words and some of the basics of how the language works, you can pretty much communicate with Spanish speaking people.
After you have done all the lessons you will have the confidence to speak to people. You won’t have a huge vocabulary but you should be able to make yourself understood.
Rocket Spanish has a bigger aim. It teaches you reading, writing, speaking and comprehension. It is a more traditional course and uses audio, quizzes, test, games and visual cues to impart Spanish knowledge.
In brief, Rocket Spanish has an audio course, a grammar and vocabulary written/audio course, educational games that teach vocabulary, verb conjugation and listening comprehension. It also has a plenty of tests at the end of each lesson that helps to reinforce your learning.
Michel Spanish Review
Plus points -
Fast way to learn Spanish/easy to use
Fairly cheap
Negative points -
Limited to speaking skills and a fairly small set of vocabulary
Michel Thomas does not have the best Spanish accent so not good for pronunciation.
Go get the Michel Thomas Spanish course
Rocket Spanish Review
Plus points -
Get a lot of content for the price – teaches reading, writing, listening, speaking
Uses a variety of teaching methods
Complete course
Negative points -
Not a quick learn product. Sure you can go through the audio course really quickly but if you want to use all the grammar lessons it will probably take a few months to go through.
Posted in Learn Spanish
I have used both Michel Thomas and Rocket to learn Spanish. Starting as a total novice, I found the Michel Thomas course a far easier introduction. Each word was introduced, explained and then used in several different ways so that I became very familiar with the word and its usage. I found that the Rocket course tended to hit me with 10 words together, explain only a portion of them, then move on leaving me feeling slightly uneasy that I’d fully understood the section. For example, it used estoy and soy (the difference between which Michel Thomas explains early and well), but Rocket simply led me to know they both mean “I am” without knowing the difference between them – even that they are derived from different verbs. Whilst Thomas builds up a sentence slowly and deliberately, Rocket hits you with a 5 or 6 line conversation and then pulls it apart. It means that there is a lot of “dead time” whilst you listen to something incomprehensible, waiting for someone to explain it. This method may work for some people, but it did not work well for me.