Michel Thomas style dialect course wanted

[myrtonos]

I will introduce you to the Michel Thomas method. To hear a sample of the method, go onto this page To hear a sample of the Michel Thomas German course, go onto this page, click on try a free audio sample, then select German under 'Choose a language', then select total from 'Then select a level'.
Language transfer has another German course using the same method, called complete German.

Note that a volunteer student, that is feature in both the courses I mentioned is not strictly necessary.
But what does help is to have at least two speakers, one to speak about (and only about) the language from the learners point of view, and another for the native speaking pronunciation. This is what another language teacher called Paul Noble does in his courses, published by Collins.

Michel Thomas style courses rarely use grammatical terms, and when they do, they are explained clearly. For example, students can understand what a verb is simply by telling them how to identify a verb in their own language, by endings or in position in a sentence. In case of English, nearly all verbs not ending in -ing or -ed can have 'to' front of them and 'I' 'we' or 'they' can go in place of 'to'.

[rmuss]

This seems to be basically the Pimsleur method, modified of course, but fundamentally the Pimsleur method with a non-native speaker thrown in. Language learning is necessarily multifaceted and requires the learner to use multiple methods to learn and deal with different aspects of speech. The Pimsleur method is particularly good for developing conversational skills; it has been proven to run into shortcomings in general language learning. One issue that is common is that the learner doesn't learn the orthography or spelling system of the language and is almost useless at reading or more advanced studying outside of basic conversation. It's great for the reason I listed beforehand, and it's better with a base knowledge of the language already.

In regards to this method with Pennsylvania German, that is a bit tricky, because you're necessarily dealing with the speaking. The most common speakers of the dialect are Amish and Mennonites. Yet, ironically, they wouldn't necessarily be considered the most competent of speakers as their variant of the dialect has more English influence and a lessened system of inflection when considering written variants and especially standard German. Further teaching someone to speak doesn't fix the issue of which orthographic system to use. Buffington-Barba seems the most popular online, but then there was that Bible translation done recently using an English-based system. But ultimately all of this runs into the main issue; interest and funding. This website can attest to both, honestly.