Avoid Michel Thomas- unless you want a British accent

Just a warning for people- I thought it would be interesting to try Michel Thomas’s method for Japanese as a supplement to what I’m already doing, and I had to stop because I felt like I was fighting the recording.

The problem is that you have an instructor who is not a native speaker teaching two brand new students, and there is a native speaker present (allegedly. I haven’t been studying it too long but I don’t think 食べますis pronounced ‘Tah-bay-mass’ like the bay at the ocean and the mass of an atom). So when you hear a new word, first you hear it pronounced with a British accent by the instructor, then by the new students who aren’t saying it very well, then by the instructor again, and finally you hear it spoken by the ‘native’ speaker a single time. So you hear it pronounced wrongly (and sometimes butchered by the British instructor – “sand-weechy” for サンドイッチ? There’s a whole two vowels missing!) four times before you hear it correctly one time. You will most definitely walk away from this with a British accent if it’s the first thing you use. I was intrigued because it was going into some grammar rules and stuff but with this being my first serious language learning endeavor I thought it best to avoid so I don’t ruin the good pronunciation I’ve developed. Just a heads up I thought people would find useful