SIN APUNTES, SIN DEBERES, SIN MEMORIZAR: EL MILAGRO DE MICHAEL THOMAS

Aprendiendo chino, enseñando chino

Sin apuntes, sin deberes, sin memorizar: el milagro de Michael Thomas
Para familiarizarse con el chino y progresar en poco tiempo sin complejos recomiendo
el Método de Michael Thomas. Michael Thomas fue un profesor de lenguas extranjeras que
desarrolló un método buenísimo para aprender idiomas; logró tanta fama por la eficacia del
método, que, entre otras personalidades, tuvo como alumnos a Woody Allen, al que enseñó
francés, y a Emma Thompson que acudió a él para aprender español.
Estos son los puntos sencillos, y no tan fáciles de seguir como parece, que hay que tener en
cuenta si decides aprender siguiendo el método de Michael Thomas.
1. No hay que tomar apuntes, no hay que hacer deberes y no hay que memorizar.
2. La responsabilidad del aprendizaje es del profesor, no del alumno.
3. No te castigues si cometes errores: es normal, estás aprendiendo.
4. No memorices, tómate tiempo para pensar.
Estos puntos elementales tienen que ver mucho con nuestra actitud a la hora de aprender.
Normalmente los españoles cuando nos enfrentamos al estudio de cualquier materia solemos
coger apuntes, hacer deberes y memorizar, es decir, hacemos aburrido lo que vamos a
aprender, además de estresarnos con el mismo proceso de aprendizaje. Yo soy una experta en
este tipo de método estresante, y por eso me resulta raro que un tipo nos diga que no hagamos
deberes y sobre todo que no memoricemos, pero entonces ¿cómo lo hacemos?
Los tonos del mandarín
Michael Thomas utiliza varias técnicas, algunas se usan para enseñar a los niños. Por ejemplo,
para aprender los tonos del mandarín, activa diferentes zonas del cerebro, una zona más visual e
incluso un aprendizaje relacionado con el movimiento del cuerpo.
A la hora de estudiar los tonos del chino, relaciona cada tono con un color y un movimiento del
cuerpo además de contarnos una historia asociada a ese tono, al color y al movimiento.
En el primer tono, es un tono plano y alargado. Le adjudicamos el color verde, como el de
una pradera plana. Cada vez que aprendamos una palabra con el primer tono, debemos colocar
la mano con el puño cerrado y el dedo pulgar en horizontal e intentar acompañar el sonido con
el movimiento (zhong)
El segundo tono es ascendente y alargado, por lo tanto subimos el dedo índice hacia arriba
mientas alargamos la sílaba. El color de este tono es azul, como el cielo, que es donde apunta
nuestro dedo (rén)
El tercer tono baja para luego subir, su símbolo es la V de victoria y el rojo su color porque es
como si hundiésemos la mano en una sandía para arrancar un trozo (Wǒ).
El cuarto tono es hacia abajo, debemos colocar el dedo hacia abajo y alargar el sonido,
apuntamos hacia el suelo y su color es el negro (shì)
Por último está el tono neutro, al que acompañamos del puño cerrado y no le asociamos ningún
color.
En este cuadro se muestra un resumen del estudio de los tonos por colores y por movimientos de
la mano:

Intentar aprender cada palabra asociando los tonos a su color y su movimiento,

de esta forma, aplicamos una regla nemotécnica que activa asociaciones que
nos ayudan a fijar el conocimiento casi de una manera intuitiva.

The online polyglot community seems to be a fairly small but well-connected

group. Most of us tend to be educated professionals with a passion for languages,
travel and culture. They are, however a few “rock stars” in this arena who have
taken this avocation to whole other level. One such “rock star” is
Moses McCormick.Moses (at last check) is “conversational plus” in over 50
languages. This is clearly a pretty amazing feat considering that he is only in his
20’s and most of us can’t even name 20 languages. Moses began his language
studies at The Ohio State University where he majored in Chinese and became a
highly sought after language tutor. A tutor not just in Chinese, but in several other
languages, including some that he never studied. Since then he continues to
accumulate more languages. He currently spends three months on each new
language but approaches no more than four languages a year. Clearly Moses has
found a way to “hack” the system. He has and he calls it the
FLR method.FLR stands for “Foreign Language Roadrunning” and is designed to
get students up to conversational ability quickly. Through his own studies, he
identified several common components and phrases which were necessary to
speak at an elementary level. He also noticed these same sentences applied to
whichever language he was studying. No, it was not “This is a pencil … This is a
blackboard” … My house is big …This car is new…” He found that learning key
interrogatives and memorizing several predictable, stock sentences was much
more useful and efficient. For the interrogative “what” , for example, he might
learn:
Q: What’s your reason for learning Chinese? / Nǐ xuéxí zhōngwén de yuányīn shì shénme?
A: I want to learn Chinese because I want to go to China one day. / Wǒ xiǎng xué zhōngwén
yīnwei wǒ yào dào zhōngguó qù
Q: What is your job? /Nǐ de gōngzu. shì shénme?
A: I’m a student / Wǒ shì yīge. xuéshēng
Q: What do you do? / Nǐ shì zuò shénme de?
A: I study at the university. I’m a teacher / Wǒ zài dàxué xuéxí. Wǒ shì yīg. lǎoshī
Q: What is your age/How old are you? / Nǐ duōda le
A: I’m 30 years old. / Wǒ 30 suì
Q: What do you do in your spare time? / Nǐ yǒu kòng de shíhou zuò shénme? etc…
Once all the stock questions and answers are familiarized for all the interrogatives, he
introduces what he calls “key words”. These are the connector words that give speech the
fluidity expressed by advanced speakers. He has about 40 of them. A few for example are :

as long as, continue, still, probably, maybe, usually, sometimes, ok, I see, once in a while,
always, especially, like this, like that, must, simply, yet, I feel that etc.
He memorizes these 40 words and then uses them to recompose the sentences that he has
previously learned. The key words can then link several of the sentences together and give
a sense of fluidity to them. He makes his own drills by writing and memorizing these
recombined sentences. Once he has done this he gets to work speaking with as many native
speakers as he can find. For some more obscure languages he has to do it online or in chat
rooms. For a language like Mandarin, however, it is usually not too difficult to find
speakers in the community.

This is supplemented by using a textbook and recombining the textbook’s dialogues with
the key words as above. He then does the same process for comprehension difficulties:
eg: “I can’t understand you when you speak that fast, if you slow down I might be able to
understand better…”. This is followed by creating a stock paragraph introducing oneself
that can be automatically reproduced from memory with a native speaker.
This method has been incredibly effective for Moses and his students. I met with him over
Skype yesterday to discuss the method and how I could apply it to my Mandarin
quest. Moses greeted me with a huge smile. He is incredibly friendly and clearly has a
passion for languages and linguistics. We went through his own current plan for learning
German. I was amazed! 50+ languages and he hadn’t tackled German yet. We shared a
laugh over that one.

The great thing about his FLR method is that the learner can self-tailor it to his/her own
needs. We talked about the textbooks that I was using and he pointed out that I could use a
free online course called “Book 2”. Think about it. Countless scores of people are
throwing hundreds of dollars away on ineffective courses like “Rosetta Stone” and Moses is
using a free online course called Book 2 (& getting much better
results!) http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/
We came up with a plan for me to efficiently tackle Mandarin Chinese. This week I am
going to familiarize myself with the key words and memorize a solid chunk of the key
questions and answers. The DLI course is on hold for right now and in its place I will start
going through the Assimil Chinese With Ease course. The Assimil course lends itself to
this sort of method better than the DLI course does. Oh yeah, and I am definitely going to
check out the Book 2 course!

Moses has been kind enough to outline his method and link a few videos here: http://how-
to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=18808&PN=1&TPN=1
………..