A constructive use of time – learning German, pt 2

Michel Thomas and I have been getting along great. I think that I'd probably be his favourite pupil if (i) he were not dead, (ii) we'd ever met and (iii) I was being taught German by him along with the other muppets on his foundation course CDs. I'm way better at it than them.

I reckon he'd say "Right!" to me quite a lot. Which leads me to an early problem in writing about learning to speak German, as opposed to writing German. I can't find any satisfactory way of transposing how Michel says "Right!" due to his Franco-German accent. At best, it's kind of like:

Ggggcccchrrriiiiight!

His "r" is that sort of throat clearing sound that language learning books will (lazily) tell you time and again is like the "ch" in the Scottish "loch". Put aside the fact that they are referencing a different language in order to explain how it's said in English AND the fact that "how to learn Spanish" books use the same simile for pronouncing "j" – it's not ggggcccchrrriiiiight.

The closest I can get to it is the growl Tigger makes after he's finished singing his theme song in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons. Unfortunately I can't find a link which includes it, so you'll have to imagine it.

However, while searching for the above I got this AWESOME Swedish version of the song. And this version in Finnish is even better.

Anyway.

The Michel Thomas method is a very unusual way of learning.

I'm 4 CDs in to the course, and we're probably using no more than 200 different words – and yet building up long sentences like "I'm not going to give it to you today because I don't have it now." It's all about grammar and word order, with vocabulary almost being ignored.

Why don't they teach like that in schools? Why do they confuse kids with terms like "dative" instead of saying "to me is mir, me in any other sense is mich"? [Pardon me if it's not quite that simple]. Why did I bother learning the German for "pedestrianised area" (Fußgängerzone – I'll never forget it) at age 14 instead of a rather more useful word like "because" (weil) which I have no recollection of ever coming across before?

And why do we emphasise WRITING in foreign languages at the expense of SPEAKING and LISTENING? The way that Michel has it in his course seems ggggcccchrrriiiiight to me.

Postscript: Please excuse the irrelevant image. I am following the longstanding tradition of newspaper business editors and putting an exciting picture on a boring story.