Michel Thomas survived imprisonment in several Nazi concentration camps after serving in the Maquis of the French Resistance and worked with the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II.
15 Facts About Michel Thomas
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Michel Thomas was arrested several times, and finally sent to Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence.
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When Dachau was liberated on April 29,1945, Michel Thomas learned the whereabouts of Emil Mahl, whom Michel Thomas arrested two days later.
4.
Michel Thomas engineered a post-war undercover sting operation that resulted in the arrest of several former SS officers.
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In 1947, Michel Thomas emigrated to Los Angeles, where an uncle and cousins resided.
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Michel Thomas opened a language school in Beverly Hills called the "Polyglot Institute" and developed a language-teaching system known as the "Michel Thomas Method", which he claimed would allow students to become conversationally proficient after only a few days' study.
7.
Michel Thomas remained unmarried until 1978 when he wedded Los Angeles schoolteacher Alice Burns; the couple had a son and daughter before the marriage ended in a divorce.
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In 1997, Michel Thomas participated in a BBC television science documentary, The Language Master, in which he taught a five-day course in French to a group of UK sixth form students who had no previous experience with the language.
9.
Michel Thomas died of cardiac failure at his home in New York City on January 8,2005, aged 90.
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Michel Thomas is known to have been fluent in seven tongues: Polish, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Yiddish.
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Michel Thomas was a language teacher with a specific approach to teaching.
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Michel Thomas proposed that there is no such thing as a student with learning difficulties, only teachers with teaching difficulties.
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Michel Thomas felt his method would "change the world"; he only started with languages as he felt that it was the most alien thing a person could learn.
14.
Harold Goodman spent ten years working with Michel Thomas and is the only person to whom Thomas taught his method.
15.
Subsequently, Dr Goodman was hired by Hodder publishers, UK, to produce a Michel Thomas Spoken Mandarin course.