I started using his Italian series about 2 weeks ago. I believe there are full courses for French, Spanish, German, Italian, and beginner courses for Russian and a few other languages.

Basically, the course is all-audio, and has this old guy teaching two students while you listen along. With the Italian course, he started by introducing some words that were similar, such as "acceptable" and "possible". Then he taught how to say "It is possible", "It is acceptable", and the negated forms. From here it quickly (but comfortably progresses), and after...about an hour's worth of lessons, I was surprised to find that I easily knew how to say stuff like "Can you tell me where it is, because I can't find it."

The program focuses a lot on verbs and pronouns, particularly on being able to freely manipulate them to express many ideas. It may sound similar to Pimsleur, but it's really quite different...Pimsleur relies a bit too much on memorization, and though you often get a feel for the language, you don't really know how to confidently manipulate what you know. The end result with Pimsleur is that you have a limited vocabulary, and you can mainly only use various memorized phrases.

Anyways, I'm liking Michel Thomas' method quite a bit. It's really amazing how much you can communicate with just verbs.

True that. I did all the russian they offer in one week. Pimsleur was way too boring, I would lose interest after 10 lessons. They try to stretch it out into 3 months as well(1 lesson a day, 30 lessons per units, 3 units). And Pimsleur doesnt ask you to make sentences they havent already said, michel thomas asks you often to form your own sentences. I believe at the end of next month they are coming out with the first japanese version, if anyone's interested.

Anyone interested in paying for a language course, keep in mind that pimsleur costs $300, but each level of michel thomas is 50 dollars or less on amazon, so >150 for 3 levels. Michel thomas is a superior program and definitely an exceptional value.

I have been using the French series and it is surprisingly good. The one concern I had when I started the course, however, was that it wouldn't be very good for learning to read French, since it is conducted entirely by audio recordings. But I soon learned that Michel Thomas always gives the spelling for each word -- or the basic form for each set of words -- that he teaches, and this has given me the capability to either get the gist or completely understand French poetry and Asterix comics, depending on their complexity.

The only complaint I have is that for the courses Michel Thomas did himself, he isn't a native speaker. (He's Polish). He speaks the languages, but I don't quite like getting a language "second-hand".

Amusingly, the newer courses (after his death) have native speakers, but apparently they also have much less content.