Category Archives: Answers to your questions

Based on real questions from the viewers and readers not only here but all over the places I write. Some of these were also answered elsewhere, but especially YouTube doesn’t give enough space for a decent answer to most good questions.

Please don’t ask me private questions unless it is on something really private, as otherwise I will probably not answer unless I’m allowed to share it wider. That doesn’t apply to people I know in real life or to people seeking spiritual guidance.

Cessation of the Charismata? Yes and no.

Pentecostés. Óleo sobre lienzo, 275 × 127 cm. ...

An artistic view of Pentecost

I was asked in private mail in YouTube this week if I am a cessationist when it comes to the Charismata, or spiritual gifts such as glossolalia, healings, prophesyings, etc, as outlined in parts of the New Testament. A cessationist would argue that these gifts were for a certain period and then were withdrawn.

I am not sure I would say that I entirely am a cessationist, in that I believe in the sovereignty of God at all times and that God is able to make people speak in tongues or be healed today just as much as He was in apostolic times. The fact however remains that God does not always deal with His people in the same way at all times. When the people of God were led through the wilderness, God led them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He gave them manna and quails to eat. When they arrived at the promised land there was no pillar of cloud, no pillar of fire, no manna and no quails unless people went and hunted for quails in the way they would today. So are we cessationist about the pillar of cloud? It’s a mere question of fact that it did indeed cease once it was no longer required and the Bible makes no attempt to cover that up. Therefore we see that particular miracles accompany particular historic events.
Once we entered into the fourth century and the Church was broadly established throughout the Roman Empire and beyond and gaining in popularity, the force of faith and the Gospel only were God’s will to carry the message forward. We don’t see much of the Apostolic Charismata applying to that period. Maybe that’s because they were no longer needed, and maybe they were only withdrawn because the Church sold out at that time to venality and carnal worliness, putting political power and Satan’s agenda before the claims of Christ and the Gospel for 1260 years, as prophesied in the Book of Daniel.

From the time of Constantine until Napoleon the true Church was engulfed by a political Church infiltrated heavily by Satan which nevertheless had many fine believers in it, and during the Reformation amazing things happened all by force of faith without much in the way of accompanying miracles or a charismatic movement.

Believers were put to death by the Roman false church in vast numbers for their proper Biblical faith, and yet none of this was accompanied by the outpourings which accompanied the Charismatic Revival.

After Napoleon, the way the battle worked changed a lot. Now the major seat of Satan was not the Holy Roman Empire invested in the Catholic Church anymore – Napoleon took back that political worldly role of the Catholic Church and handed it over to the New World Order – nation states in the main run by Freemasons and given the semblance of democracies even though their real nature was to enslave men and women as never before. From Bonaparte until the beginning of Tribulation we can trace this penultimate period of human history.

This modern period is hallmarked by the following:

1. Unparalleled numbers of people living on the planet, in fact probably over 90% of people who ever lived have had part of their lives in this period.
2. The sharp rise of secularism and the ubiquitous acceptance of the theory of evolution, and other connecting ideas all serving to undermine the view of a Creator.
3. Unheard of technologies enabling a free market of ideas and debate
4. A situation where those who believe the Gospel are able to communicate more easily than ever before with the world, so that now the Gospel has virtually been made available to every tribe and nation
5. Israel has been restored to something like its original place.
6. The world has increasingly crystallised into three camps, Gog and Magog (China and her allies vs America and the EU and other allies) and Ishmael (Islam) in between.
7. Christianity has splintered into more denominations than ever before and there are an equally large number of counterfeit sects which try to look like Christian denominations.
In the middle of this period the Charismata started to be an issue, with some people needing this boost to their faith rather than the pure faith arguments of the Reformation period. However there is little to compare the work of the Church in this period than in the pre-Constantine period.
At the same time Pentecostalist believers have contained a number of fine Christians who have done great things for the Kingdom. One only needs to look at the amazing growth of the Gospel in China to see their crowning achievement.  They have also spawned more than their fair share of weirdos, charlatans and sects. That may not be a damning indictment as we know that the closer any group of believers is to being on the ball and really making an impact, the more Satan will attack that group, and deflecting onto additional revelations, wierd doctrines, venal practices and political divisions are all weapons in his armoury against Churches that make a difference. So-called Churches than make no impact for the Gospel are, on the other hand, largely left to get on with it or actively assisted by the evil one.

“By their fruits ye shall know them” says the Lord. This doesn’t mean that the evidence of satanic attack on part of Christianity should be regarded as bad fruit. The healthiest fruit is the most attractive for worms. The question is, what is the underlying fruit that is being attacked by the worms? Is it spiritual fruit, or spiritual gifts without real spiritual fruit?

I still say that the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, etc, as set out in Scripture should be any Christian’s priority. If a person can demonstrate the fruits of the Spirit, then nobody should dare deny that persons Baptism in the Holy Spirit. It should be clear enough – how can a person who demonstrates the fruit of the spirit not be with the Holy Spirit? How can a person say they have had the Baptism in the Holy Spirit if they have not the fruits of the Spirit, even when months or years have gone by since they claimed such a Baptism? If a person lacks the fruit of the Spirit but seeks to make up the lack of them by fooling others and primarily themselves into thinking that they can speak with tongues of angels, then I’m sorry, but they need to do a heart audit and think again.

Nevertheless, a time is no doubt coming when the Spirit will be poured out again as at Pentecost. Joel 2.28 and Acts 2.17 which quotes it talks about this outpouring of the Spirit. “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” and therefore Joel is likened to what is happening in Acts. However the following verses go on to outline the end of the world scenario, which we now know did not happen in the first few hundred years after the Death and Resurrection of our Lord, although disciples at the time expected it, and were intended to expect it.

I see a lot of the outpouring in Acts and which is in evidence in the Churches to whom Paul writes his Epistles as being a help in Evangelisation – and it surely was as people understood these languages as if they were being spoken to in their own languages. (This of course is not the case in most Pentecostal and other Evangelical churches today – the fact above all other I dare suggest, that leads to many serious-minded Christians who came to faith in Pentecostalism gradually transferring to other churches instead, which happens a lot.) But I also beyond that see them as a renewal of the Joel prophesy, a reminder and more information for us as to what will happen in the last days. I do like what the authors of the Left Behind books have made of the Tongues issue and other spiritual gifts – they show them as being revised in the last days and that is expressis verbis told to us in Acts 2.17ff and the Joel passage. They clearly refer to the end-times period. This is a period which has not started yet, but since all the pre-requisites for the starting of this period are now pretty much in place, and the pace of preparation of the coming Antichrist in this world is is palpably quickening from one week’s end to the next at this time, we can say with confidence that this is the penultimate period, and it is not long now before you really will see New Testament style miracles, unless of course the Church is first raptured in which case it will be only those coming to faith who were left behind who will witness them. And since I think that this planet has not seen the last of the true miraculous charismata, I can’t really call myself a cessationist.

However I do call myself a person who urges faith without the need for miracles, discretion in how we publish abroad the miracles which God does give us (the better we keep these secrets the more we will have of them, as it’s God’s will still for this time that the preaching of the Gospel not be accompanied by miracles in the main, but that He himself grants the holy gift of faith by the pure preaching of the word, nevertheless He is very merciful in alleviating the distresses of believers and answering prayers for them that have understanding…) and most of all in examining ourselves first and foremost for Spiritual fruit, and only after a satisfactory answer to that question (a rare event anyway) to worry about the advanced issue of Spiritual gifts.

 

Goldlist thoughts by Cyderspace

The gender of countries in the French language...

Sometimes maps and charts can help the remembering of gender names for countries, as this one for French, for example. You can do similar things for months of the year, etc. There's no reason why drawing a map on one double page of a Goldlist book and retracing it shouldn't be a nice break from the usual modalities of Goldlisting.

An excellent comment appeared in the Goldlist page, which I thought deserved to be elevated here as a main article together with my answers. So here goes:

I just thought I’d write a bit about your Goldlist method while I’ve got a few spare minutes. I have just started using it and wonder what your thoughts are on a few issues I have.

First a little background:

I had, by chance really, happened upon my own method of learning vocab but without really thinking much about the function or structure . Like yourself I had an instant aversion to the standard mnemonic memory tricks, thinking that I just didn’t need all of that extra baggage to learn simple words. I also didn’t get on with flashcards very well. Since I was getting all of my vocab from reading literature I was looking up a lot of words in order to simply follow the story. This was time consuming and I would frequently realise that I had already looked up a certain word, sometimes several times already, only at the point of once again looking it up.

This all changed when I purchased a brilliant dictionary for my Iphone which had a ‘favourites’ folder where you could bookmark words for learning later. However I found that I didn’t ‘learn them later’- I simply looked them up again and again. It was much quicker to type half a word than search through the pages of a dictionary and it would also tell me if I had that word already in my favourites list. After about a month or so, I would go through the list of favourites and delete the ones I definitely knew. So, depending on how common the word was, I was, by default almost, using a spaced repetition system, though I knew nothing of this type of system at that time. I found that I was learning the words without trying, just by reading them. And it won’t surprise you to learn that some words would ‘stick’ first time and others took many ‘passes’. There are obviously problems with this rather disorganised method , for instance the slow rate of vocabulary acquisition and the limited source of the vocabulary to name but two.

So when I found out about your goldlist system I immediately thought of the similarities to what I was doing and thought that it could definitely be an improvement. I agree with you about our relationship with the subconscious long-term memory and that explains why words can simply ’appear’ into my vocabulary without me remembering even remembering having heard them – if that makes sense. My subconscious has ‘sampled’ them from a radio program or somewhere without me realising. I also see the same process occurring with my kids who can grab the strangest words and phrases from seemingly nowhere.

I have only been using the goldlist for a month or so and so have only done a hand-full of distillations but I was wandering what you thought about a couple of issues I have come across so far:

If I still get most of my vocabulary from reading literature then I cannot avoid coming across a certain amount of the words again, by accident, before its time to distil, simply by looking them up whilst trying to follow the story.

I would be inclined not to worry about that unduly. These are probably the words which are coming up so often that in the grander scheme of things you won’t get too far in the language without automatically knowing them very well anyway.

I sometimes find that I am very familiar with the word itself but have trouble remembering the translation. This can be exacerbated when I look again at the headlist and remember the word itself very well but not necessarily the meaning. I have ‘sampled’ the word but not the meaning.

You could find it useful just briefly to think about the object or activity or idea of the word while saying it aloud, but don’t repeat it or drill it or construct contrived mnemonics. Just the way you woul have done it for yourself as a child when you met a new word you had some kind of image in your head that it got associated with, and that has stood you in good stead till today even though it might have been a very childish image or a very idiosyncratic, personalised image.

I don’t yet find it easy to remember the genders of words using this method.

The genders of nouns (which are the words carrying implicit genders, not all words do so) can be learned best by applying general rules to them. For most languages that have gender, there are rules that enable you to predict the gender of most words. A clear example are languages like Italian, Russian, Czech, Spanish, where if a noun ends in ”-” then by default it’s feminine unless there’s a reason.  Beyond that there is what you might call ‘natural gender‘ - nouns talking about men are usually masculine even if they have an ending that looks feminine. The next thing is etymological gender. In Spanish you will find that a lot of words ending in -ma are el and not la because Castillian likes to reflect the classic origin of its vocabulary, and in Greek nouns like sistema and problema were neuter and so they are subsumed as in most of the vulgar Latin fall-out languages into the masculine.

If you look carefully at most languages with genders, rules giving the gender from the structure of the noun cover from 30 to 90% of cases. If you are learning a language with 90% then you are nearly home and dry, but for 30% ones you have to rely more on the natural gender clues and the etymology. They are least will help you make sense of it. Taking for an example three feminine nouns in German, Leidenschaft, Mutter and Jugend, we have an example of each kind I am talking about. Leidenschaft you learn as feminine because there is a rule that any book worth its salt should be telling you and that is that all the words ending in -schaft, heit, taet, keit and several others are feminine. So that is structural gender. Die Mutter has no structural gender, it ends in -er like Vater but it has a clear natural gender. You would automatically say “she” for mother in English. Maedchen (girl) you would say ‘she’ for in English too, but in German it remains “es” because the structural gender of -chen is stronger than natural gender, and neutral gender in German doesn’t carry to quite the extent as in English the dehumanizing effect when applied to people. It simply carries a desexualising effect. But why “die Jugend”? It doesn’t look like a feminine word, there is no real reason why youth should be seen as feminine, but it is down to the etymology.  Assuming we don’t want to look at OHG and Gothic and try to reconstruct a version of “jugend” in which the gender is more visible, we can simply learn “die Jugend” as an exception and always Goldlist it with the appropriate der/die/das form (which you wouldn’t have to with more obvious cases), but it we do start to scratch the matter using Wiktionary or some other etymological sources we see that it goes back to “jugunth” in West Germanic and “geogiuth” (pronounced “yoyouth”, becoming later “youth”) in Anglo-Saxon. How does this help, you may well ask. Well, consider a common ancestor of ‘geogiuth’ and ‘jugunth’ and you might see something that could also be related to the French “jeunesse” which is structurally feminine. So going down the etymological road can help!

Simply asking yourself “why might this word be the gender it is” can do a lot to help you remember, even if all you do is speculate for two seconds. Glossing over it entirely as you Goldlist may not be as helpful, but trying to rote learn genders by senseless on the spot repetition is even less helpful. 

My active vocabulary can only be increased by ‘needing’ to say a word and I still may need to look it up to do this. Therefore, have I really learned the word if I can only recognise it whilst reading?

In fact yes, as you will always slip back into not having words on the tip of your tongue and the reactivation perio is three days of immersion only, whereas language learners waste time on this Holy Grail of imagined fluency and it prevents them building up a larger vocabulary base in the language. There is nothing wrong with being able to follow a written text and spoken text without losing the drift. If you can do this then you are fluent and the difference between this latent fluency and active fluency is being there in an immersed situation for three days. The brain by that time switches on the whole synapse set you need to be finding the words you actually know at speech speed, and the fact you understand them when someone else says them – and would know if they were using those words wrongly or saying them wrongly if it were for example another learner – means you do know the word and ought to relax on that score.

Language schools make a lot of money by the way out of cultivating the learner’s expectation that they will be  able to do the performing seal act in a language at the drop of a hat. That’s how they pad out a small amount of course material in class over a longer time, and take years and years of your money to do what can be done on your own and in months not years.

Still, some people just enjoy going to language lessons. Some enjoy the social setting. Fine, it’s their money…

I don’t see these questions as problems as such since my goal is increasing the speed of my vocabulary acquisition and that is already working. It was just to find out what you think.

Well, the above is what I think. What do you think of what I think?

Also as a separate question: How would you define being fluent in a language.? At what level do you consider yourself fluent? Or is this question relevant at all anyway. I only ask this last question because it’s one I am asked a lot and cannot usually give people a satisfactory answer. I feel it’s a distraction at best. It’s easy to tell when someone is fluent and just as easy to say when someone isn’t. As for the in between?

I think that ‘fluency’ is a funny concept when you really get down to it. Let’s imagine someone who likes to say very little even in his own language, but reads a lot and listens a lot. He understands everything but like the wise old owl in the nursery rhyme, “the more he heard, the less he spoke”. Someone else , let’s say his brother, talks nineteen to the dozen and can speak about 200 words a minute and will if you let him, but doesn’t actually know half the words or understand half the concepts of his silent brother.

Who in this case is the more “fluent”? Why, according to the standard definitions of fluency, it is the one who can talk and not let anyone else get a word in edgeways. He is so fluent he is superfluent, and one might even say effluent! But who has the more useful knowledge of language? Who can use the language to get at deeper concepts? Who, when it comes to sitting back and writing three lines that express perfectly what they mean, will prove the more competent in their language?

And there are many mileposts. For the missionary, he is not fluent until he can pray in the language of the people to whom he is sent. The accountant working in a foreign country is not fluent until he has mastered the technical terms, but may still prefer to address God in his native tongue, that is, that of the learner, as we don’t know for sure if even Adam spoke the Divine language, if there is one. The mileposts should be set as individual KPIs for the individual learner, and one of them is the individual learner’s definition of fluency. We shouldn’t set “fluency” in a language as meaning to be able to talk for half an hour for somebody who like the taciturn brother above has no inclination to sound off like that even in his native language.  For the other brother, who wants to be able to talk like that, then for him the definition of fluency might well be that he can get the same points over and with the same style and persuasion, or lack of it, as he has in his native language. Their individual definitions of fluency are determined by their individual need profiles and the applications of language that they are likely to encounter.

Given the above, decide what fluency is for you, you’re welcome to share that here, and for you that becomes the goal, if fluency is your goal. Don’t call fluency in German being able to do the Frankfurter Allgemeiner crossword in ten minutes if you can’t do your own paper’s crossword in ten minutes, though, because that is asking for more than equivalent functionality in the new language than you used in the native one, and that’s not a fair definition of fluency in language. That doesn’t make it an invalid goal, it is just something other than pure language acquisition. And please don’t confuse the performing seal act you tend to see done by YouTube polyglots as necessarily genuine linguistic fluency. You don’t know if they’ve memorised a text or not.

 Many thanks for some excellent considerations!

Answering Victor Berrjod

image

Victor asked to see some of the goldlisting of the Heisig book recently described in practice. I picked a relatively early point in the book to show – this is the 10% mark – and please note in this particular book the headlist is on the right and the first distillation on the left.  No frames were actually distilled out on this page but you can see the stories getting shorter.

Questions on Goldlist method and Japanese Kanji.

Book cover (5th ed.)

Image via Wikipedia

Mugiwara wrote some very good questions which deserve a reply as a new article. I have also today answered smaller but equally good questions on the Goldlist Methodology page, so people with outstanding queries about the method may also like to read them. Anyway, here goes for Mugiwara’s great questions:

Hi there Mr. Huliganov.

I’m Spanish and I’m trying to learn Japanese, this language seems complicated using Gold List Method because of the kanji but I have some basic questions because my English skills are not good enough and I don’t understand some points of the method.

Kanji, especially when done the Japanese way where you have usully at least two readings as opposed to Mandarin where there is usually one and sometimes two and greater phonetic clues are embedded in the primitives for Mandarin than for Japanese, is not possible to study in exactly the same way using goldlist. The ideas behind Goldlist still hold true, but they need to be applied in a different way and the task of mastering Kanji, and Japanese in total, has to be broken down into a jigsaw, each piece of which needs to be mastered as a piece and then put back together again.

The people who gave us sudoku, sushi, bonsai trees, origami, manifold management techniques and martial arts aplenty have actually set us the most subtle and challenging puzzle of all in the form of their own language. As with all things Japanese it takes a certain technique to get it right. With the technique it is possible, without the technique it seems impossibly difficult and unachievable – still beautiful, but remote and not fully understood. That seems to be par for the course with everything they have.

In going through the answers to your excellent questions today, I will try to make clear how I think the ideas of Goldlist can best be reapplied to the question of kanji learning, which in itself is only part of Japanese language learning in total. Even when we know the Kanji and their readings, it is necessary to know the combinations and just as the Kanji themselves run beyond 3000 (of which less than 2000 are in the obligatory lists of the Ministry of Education) so the combinations of them run into the tens of thousands, and very often a word we want will not be a single kanji. We think of words as words but if you take a series of words, lets say some different metals and alloys as one series, or some well-known birds or reptiles as another, some plant types as another, let’s say, we’ll find that sometimes a word in English will be a single kanji word in Japanese, the next in the series may be a two-kanji combination or even more than two, and then the next may be a word not written in kanjis at all but may need to be written in katakana because it counts as a loanword or a technical word or an onomatopoeia.  But we will not learn to run before we can walk.

1 – I read people is trying to do huge lists like 600, 1000, 2000.. and that sounds a little scary so, as a beginner in your method, how many words are recommended to familiarize yourself with the method?

I think it is good to do first off a batch of 500 words, but if we were talking about kanji I would be shaping the method rather differently. I suggest you might take the kanji which are usually listed for JPLT #5 and there are between 180 and 280 of these depending on whose book you read or whose website you visit. I do highly rate Heisig’s 3 tome oeuvre, which is also available in Spanish although you certainly don’t need it, and a first batch could be just the “part one” kanji from that book, which is not very many. The important thing is – and this is what Heisig says and many Heisig readers seem to ignore it – you need to study the kanji with a pencil or pen in your hand and draw the kanji while thinkning of the story, but you don’t need to write it over and over at the same time. This traditional approach to Chinese characters involves a lot of wastage of time.

So to apply the Goldlist method to kanjis using a source like Heisig, instead of having the usual line by line approach, I take a book and freely write out the following: The frame number per  Heisig part 1, and the meaning (and you have to be very precise and not paraphrase Heisig’s meanings). Then I write the component primitives and an outline of the story that links the primitives to the kanji meaning. I do the same for primitives that have no Kanji status too, but they have no frame number, just an asterix.

I only use one side of the page and leave the other side for revision, and I might get five or six, or maybe only three or two on a page, depending on how much there is to say about them. At any rate, I probably wouldn’t write the kanji itself in full out more than three times. I might write the stroke order if it isn’t obvious.

I just try to go through the thought process James Heisig is presenting for the given kanji, or making one of my own up if I can see a clearer one for me than the JH one, and I write it down so that all the info is in the “Headlist” in my book and I don’t have to refer back to the book very much when I’m reviewing.

I go to the point where I have been doing it for two weeks at least, probably three or four, as otherwise whe I revise I will run up against the minimum time rule of the Goldlist method, and by that time I’ve probably done 250 or so, just by doing an hour or so every other evening. I will probably have filled the right or left hand pages of an 80-96 page A5 format writing book with these 250 kanji, in other words I dedicated to them more book space than 2500 words that I could just write out phonetically. You cannot easily learn kanji in my opinion on a one-line-per-kanji basis. It is possible to do some things with kanji that way but I would leave it until I had the understanding of kanji as kanji and then maybe do combinations, the various yomi and maybe practice sentences that way. For getting used to writing and making long term associations for primitives and how they fit into kanji and what the base meanings are, I need a much freer format, but I still have certain truths from the Goldlist method which can be brought into to service this situation.

Therefore after the requisite time of at least two weeks and a buffer on top so that I don’t catch up with less than two weeks of  myself in the middle of a batch, I use the other side in the book to do a very similar thing to what I would do in the traditional Goldlist method, namely I’m going through the material on the one side, seeing if I now know it, leaving out the ones where I can write the kanji with proper stroke order and know the meaning of it both as kanji and primitive per Heisig’s method, and the way it will appear as a primitive when pressed to the henben or left side position or the crown position or the bottom position. I do not need to know the sound in order to drop them, as in the Heisig method readings come later. If I were learning Mandarin I would probably want to know the Pinyin and have learned that, and Hoenig’s book which I use in preference to Heisig for Mandarin does have them at the same time, but that is an awful lot to want your memory to do at once and maybe it isn’t the best idea to try to do that. I don’t want to talk about Mandarin here when you are asking about Japanese, but there may well be something to be said for taking a Heisig book one approach to the Chinese characters as far as characters are concerned, do the grammar and get used to the language itself using Michel Thomas primarily followed by Pimsleur (which are audio only) and then bring in the pinyin. That is certainly the best way forward when it comes to Japanese. Even the pinyin or roomaji writing, which can be helpful of course, don’t need to come in until after one has worked through a good 12 or 15 hours of structured audio learning of a high quality, like the MT Japanese course.

That was a bit of an aside, so back to your actual questions:

2 – If you are going to do a huge list, suposedly you have to write 25 and then take a short break like 15 minutes, ok, but then you need one week or more to write all the words, right?

Let’s imagine now that you had a list of words which were all katakana words which you wanted to put to your long-term memory – you could do it on the usual list of 25 way, as is usual for the Gold list. Or if you were learning Japanese in Romaji (which can be one way of breaking it down, but I don’t recommend making do with just Romaji, doing that would just be one part of the puzzle) then you could do a 25 word list in the usual way. You would choose a batch size like 500 as above, or whatever your word list was that you wanted to learn.

Let’s say someone gives you a list of katakana words, let’s say the top few hundred by frequency words properly written in Katakana in Japanese, you could really, as long as you were comfortable enough in katakana, go ahead and use katakana to learn them in the usual goldlist manner. You would take maybe 20 – 25 minutes (depending on how well prepared the source was, and how fast you work when working for maximum comfort and enjoyment) to write your head list per double page of 25 words, and then you would probably go away for 15 minutes and do something completely different just to rest that unconscious function. If you don’t then you could have it giving way to consious learning attempts and short-term memory functions without you even realising what was going on. After all, the thing about the unconscious is that it’s not conscious, so we don’t feel it.  We know it’s there because it’s also what keeps us breathing and our hearts beating, etc, but usually we ignore it and that’s when it does its job best.

3 – After you create your headlist and let’s say a month later, do you just try to write out the words your remember or you look your list in your language and translate it?

The list has both languages in it, usually (unless the meaning is obvious and I’m just remembering the spelling or some perculiarity about the word other than its meaning), my target language and the language used for learning, which will either be my own language or a language I know much better than the target and I’m learning via that language either to hone it or because the second language is in the same group and so I’m using materials made for speakers of the first language in the group that I know, as this will home in on the differences between those two languages and reduce my risk of confusion and linguistic interference.

Now when I am reviewing it again all I want to do is objectively ask myself do I remember it or not. It is not a question of being able to go from your language to the foreign language – this is too high an expectation and anyone who expects that is chasing ends of linguistic rainbows. It is sufficient to ask yourself whether you remembered the meaning from the language you are learning into your own language or the transit language you are using to learn this new language. On top of the meaning you can ask yourself “would I have remembered the spelling” or “would I have remembered the grammatical irregularities” or “would I be able to pronounce it” whatever the reason was (when it comes to later distillations especially) that you didn’t take it out of the list earlier.

Beyond flatly taking out, you can also very validly combine some items into single line items.

Either way, if you know a word, you won’t write it again.

Now let’s go back to the idea of kanji. If we are following Heisig’s books and goldlisting them, we will consider a primitive or a kanji learned for the purposes of book one when we know the meaning of it as Kanji and Primitive, when we know the stroke order and variations of it as primitives in different positions. We need to be sure we can tell the difference between this primitive/kanji and similar ones. If we are sure that we have that image of the little story so that we really recognise the kanji or primitive and can give its meaning as in the book, would recognise it as part of another kanji with fresh elements and can write it out confident about stroke order then for the purpose of that goldlist it is learned and you can drop it.

It doesn’t matter that we haven’t got on to readings yet. Heisig students do book one to the end and then they do book two.

And it is by breaking it down this way that it becomes possble.

My Kanji goldlist bronze book has only two sides instead of the four sides I use for word goldlisting.  Less detail from the stories need to be repeated in the later distillations so when it comes to the second distillation and I have a new book the silver book, I’m able to put 5-6 per side on average and as these aren’t more than about half of the ones I set out with (I do put every single one into the headlist) I need to put in a consequent number in addition to the Heisig book one frame number.  I am not finished doing even the Headlist but it is going well so far, and I know that I will need 8 bronze books of 80-96 sides A5 each for H and D1, and 4 similarly sized books for D2-D3 and 2 of these books for D4-D5 and just the one for D6-D7.

I work using a sort of batch-step method where I take that first batch through to the end of H, then I go back and take it to D1 and afterwards add batch#2 at headlist at the end of batch 1 headlist.

After that I take batch #1 from D1 to D2, take batch #2 from H to D1, and add batch #3 after the end of it.

Let me show you that pictorially:

Here is a plan by batches and distillations of how to get through the Heising book one. A person could put on the planned time or date and also afterwards show the actual and the actual work revised if they wanted to, for each chunk.

Now let’s use the order of colours in the rainbow to show the order in which I’d take each part of the work, that is each cell in this plan.

I’ve used pixel heights for the rows of work here that exactly correspond to the % still included in the work, so that graphically this shows very clearly what the work is in total for a good approach to a big Goldlist project. To learn 2040 kanji you do 7350 pieces of work, that’s an average of three and a half per kanji – actually in line with the results of Ebbinghaus, Wozniak and most other long term memory exponents, which is no surprise – Goldlist works to your biology, it doesn’t change it. Planless repetition would give you actually a much higher workload, and many people who embark on such an exercise never come to the end of it.

You can see that each sweep of the grid using a plan like this gets progressively longer until the end of the material is reached or the end of the planned number of distillations is reached, which in this 8*8 arrangement happens at the same time. I’ll call each sweep or cycle a “pass”. In the first pass we only have the red cell so that is 240 items. Then we take the pass of the orange and yellow cells and that pass takes 448 items, so you need to make more time for it. The next pass where you have green, blue and violet is already 598 items and the one after that has a nice round 700 items, and so it goes on until the biggest one, the eighth pass, which has in this case 917 items, and then they quickly fall, so that the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th passes have 664, 471, 327 and 220 respectively as you can see from the table if you add them up, and after that point you start to have the problem that there isn’t enough to do in the two weeks you are supposed to leave between reviewing the same work, although in practice at that point it’s safe to be concurrently working on the Second Heisig Book with a separate project anyway, which you would run on similar lines.

If each item takes 2 minutes on average, which they should if you bear in mind that we write less per item in the later distillations, then this whole project is a question of 245 hours of study, while you’d break up into chunks with the breaks so that you would certainly need to take a while over it.

Allowing that there are 15 passes but that you can do concurrently the next phase after 12 of them, I’m saying that the minimum time that I’d recommend giving learning Heisig’s first book is 24 weeks, that gives you your “mandatory” two weeks per pass in order not to bump yourself. The middle parts of that need though for you to be doing according to this logic some 500 items a week which is 1000 minutes or 18 hours work a week, but the average workload of 245 hours over 24 weeks is clearly 10 hours, which is a good deal lower.  What’s more likely to happen is that you’ll have a bit slower progress in this big passes. And then you need to give a similar length of study to Book two in order to get all the kun and on yomies learned, as a separate issue.

Hence learning the joyo kanjies, their meaning and their readings before you even start to use them in sentences is a year’s work minimum. If you can do if faster your own way, then fine, but I can tell you that it means in most cases a good deal more than the 500 hours more or less I’ve suggested here to work through Heisig one and two with Goldlist principles.

4 – In your explanation of the steps to Taylor, you did a “new step” which is like creating a new list in the middle of the other one, with new words I guess but when did you started it?how long after the second destilation? and then you do two destilations at the same time? I’m a little confused.

This step is not obligatory, but can be useful if you are going slowly because you are busy with other things. I will talk more about it in the book. Don’t worry about that step for now.

I hope you can understand my questions because my English skills are just decent, and thanks.

Your English skills are more than just decent they are superior, at least from the writing I’ve seen, to the bulk of native speakers. If you achieve the same in Japanese that really will be impressive, and you might, if you work with patience, stamina and a good method! Many thanks for the great questions which I believe will have helped others also.

Nowe pytania o Goldliscie

Eagle stare

Zadal mi dobre pytania cierpliwy Jacek Orzel z Nowego Saczu:

Witam. Zobaczyłem Pana filmy na YouTube o Gold List. Mam kilka pytań.
1. uczę się już angielskiego jakiś czas i znam wiele słów i czy te słowa też muszę wpisywać do czołowej listy czy już nie, znam je na tyle że ich nie zapomnę?
2. czy mogę prowadzić równocześnie dwie Gold list jedną z językiem angielskim a drugą niemieckim?
3.wszystko co mam robić to tylko napisać słówka, odczekać 2 tygodnie sprawdzić które umiem, i przepisać te których ie zapamiętałem? wiem żeby przez 2 tygodnie do nich nie zaglądać ale czy później też się ich nie uczyć tzn. nie powtarzać?
4. czy jeśli np znajdę w internecie 2000 najczęściej używanych słów w danym języku i te słowa wykorzystam to czy taka ilość pozwoli mi się swobodnie komunikować w danym języku na codzienne potrzeby? 5. lepiej będzie jeśli słówko angielskie będę pisał na zielono a polskie znaczenia na niebiesko czy obydwie kolumny na niebiesko?
6 jeśli słowo wymawia się inaczej niż pisze to wymowę mam pisać normalnie tak jak słychać czy za pomocą transkrypcji fonetycznej( np. why – łaj)
czekam na odpowiedź.

OK, dziekuje serdecznie za cierpliwosc, nareszcie sie biore do odpowiedzi na te b. dobre pytania. Przepraszam, jezeli jestem nieformalny i per “ty” mowie, ale jakos mi sie lepiej tak piszy on-line.
1. Jezeli znasz slowo, nie ma sensu dolaczyc tego do goldlistu. Zaczalbym od poczatku osobiscie tylko gdybym znal albo mniej niz 500 slow, albo mniej niz 10% swojego docelowego slownictwa. Inaczej mozna zrobic cos takiego: wziac slownik angielsko-polski, (badz cokolwiesko-polski dla tych polakow, ktore nie chca sie uczyc angielskiego lecz innego jezyka) i wtedy odnotowac (lepiej liczyc dla siebie anizeli ufac liczbe na okladce ksiazki) liczbe pozycji (slow, czy tam “entries” tak zwane) i lepiej wziac slownik kiszonkowy o jakies 20-30 tysiecy slow w jednym kierunku (ang>pol), nie wiecej.

Wtedy wez co 17ta strone i co 17ta pozycje (lub co 13. strone i co 13. pozycje albo cokolwiek co bedzie juz z gory nakladany jako algorytm) i napis te slowa – i czy znales to czy nie. Mozna tez prosic kogo innego o pomoc jezeli chcesz byc totalnie objektywnym. Wez ze 100 slow i daj sobie 1 pkt jezeli:

- znasz conamniej podstawowy zakres znaczen tego slowa, i
- umialbys to napisac bez bledow ortografycznych
- znasz gramatyczne warianty typu nieregularnych liczb mnogich oraz czasoe przeslych, itd
- umialbys to wymowic prawidlowo, napotykajac na to podczas czytania na glos.

Jezeli nawet jest elementem niepewnosci, lub gdzie myslisz ze to wszystko znasz ale nie czynnie tylko biernie, daj 1 punkt.

Jezeli mialbys blad ortograficzny, lub nie znasz czegos z podstawowych zakresu znaczen, lub nie umiesz to wymowic, ale cos tam bys pewnie zrozumial z kontekstu daj sobie pol punktu. Innymi slowami 20% do 80% wiedzy slowa to jest pol punkt, 81%-100% wiedzy to jest punkt, a mniej niz 20% jest zero. Read the rest of this entry

RL101 – 5 Revision of the first 17 letters

With 171 likes to 3 dislikes at the time of posting this up to Huliganov.tv blog, this remains one of my most popular pieces. The revision of the first half of the Russian alphabet contains already a list of words, 31 in total, using the letters learned so far, unlike the previous lessons, which concentrated on letter only.

The joke “I spoil that woman” and the song Katiusha sung by myself and Elena have also elicited flattering comments from the viewership.

The word-list for this lesson is as follows, in alphabetical order of both languages:

адвокат lawyer café кафе
вот here is country страна
где where daddy папа
город town, city garden, orchard сад
да yes glass стакан
дерево tree he он
дом house, home here is вот
кафе café house, home дом
кот tomcat it оно
кто who juice сок
мама mother just, straight on просто
медсестра nurse lawyer адвокат
метро underground train mother мама
налево on the left no нет
направо on the right not не
не not nurse медсестра
нет no on the left налево
окно window on the right направо
он he she она
она she sister сестра
оно it soldier солдат
папа daddy there там
правда truth, true toilet туалет
просто just, straight on tomcat кот
сад garden, orchard town, city город
сестра sister tree дерево
сок juice truth, true правда
солдат soldier underground train метро
стакан glass where где
страна country who кто
там there window окно
туалет toilet yes да

The stubborn ear of the first-time linguist.

Portrait of Jane Austen, from the memoir by J....

Meet your new English teacher...

This is an answer to the question received from Grzegorz Siwiec which I’ve answered also where he put it in the Goldlist section, and also I wanted to make an article of it in its own right as it’s a great question. I’ve added a bit more here than in the answer to his question, so hopefully you’ll read it here as well. The additional bit is at the end.

You basically said that when you read English you understand a lot, but when you hear even the same text spoken, you understand a lot less. You asked whether the Goldlist method would help with listening.

OK, so here’s the answer.

Firstly, reading and listening are two sides of the same discipline. They are both the passive sides of linguistic activity. Linguistic activity, like mathematical activity, has four main functions. In maths we have addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. And just as division is like the opposite or passive side of multiplication, so hearing is the passive side of speaking. And just as subtraction is the passive side of addition, so reading is the passive side of writing. And just as it is easier to do big subration sums than it is to do long division without a calculator, so it is that the beginner until fluency is gained will find the passive activity of reading to be easier than the passive activity of hearing.

In reading, we provide in our heads our own “voice” for the words and we “listen” to that. But it is a voice that we have made and therefore it will contain the mispronunciations that we have picked up. We may hear the same word back read by a native speaker and it may sound different because the pronunciation is not what we expected. The Goldlist can help here if you note with words in the goldlist any unexpected pronunciation to an English word if you’re learning English or other not precisely phonetic language.

In the main the reason why we do not understand a spoken text as well is that the tempo it is presented in will be someone else’s tempo. When we read we adjust the speed of the internal voice to match what we are comfortable with. We pause when we need to think about a word, whereas in a spoken text the voice carries on while we still need to chew on an earlier word, and we get lost. We can also see an unfamiliar word and analyse it for etymological clues, and do things that we don’t have time for when listening to a text. If we do get lost we can repeat it.

So don’t expect following a spoken text to be equally easy as following a written one. Not unless you are learning Japanese, that is. And even there, the speech of some speakers, especially male speakers, is quite hard to follow. Bear in mind also that some languages swallow half the letters, for instance French and Danish, and many accents of English. Accents in themselves cause listening comprehension to be much tougher than reading comprehension, especially in languages like German or English which contain strong dialects. In Polish even the Zakopane accent is not so hard to follow – I heard some on the radio this morning as a local was commenting record visitors to the place last long weekend. Kashubian is the biggest challenge maybe, or a thick Silesian, but Kashubian counts as another language and even Silesian is not as far from Polish as some of the dialects around England are from one another. People speaking southern England dialect can follow standard Australian or American with much greater facility than they can follow broad Geordie or Scouser once they get going. Please make sure you are following people who are speaking a form of English that is fairly standard. Many Poles went to Ireland and pride themselves on getting an Irish brogue, but the downside is that they aren’t all that understandable to other native speakers. Irish is a lovely accent when it’s authentic, but it’s not one the foreigner should be aiming to copy for international use if they can help it. I’m not talking Terry Wogan here, I’m talking a strong Irish accent.

So, what tools can one use to improve listening comprehension? In the good old days, in schools we used to be given dictees in French – less so in German as it was more self evident how things were written as long as a person wasn’t speaking to us in Schwaebisch. I understand that ‘dyktando’ was also used in Polish schools. You can actually give yourself a dictation by taking an audiobook and sampling a paragraph at random on the mp3, writing it out from listening to the actor read and then checking it back to the book.

You don’t even need to write it, you can simply listen to an audiobook paragraph by paragraph, then read the original to see if you understood everything, and then mark the words you still don’t know, and then use the translation to get those words, which by the way should be added to the Goldlist headlist. This linguistic Triathlon is a great way to develop both the passive skills.

The best way to go about it is to see if you can get three things for the same novel or short story: first the audiobook read by a good actor on mp3 on audible.com or other sources. There’s no shortage of material out there on the net and not all of it is paid, if you get my drift. second you need the English original and finally you need a Polish translation. It probably helps if at least one of the two written ones is in printed form – a print-out if not a book bought or borrowed from the library. By using this method you’ll gradually come to see that you need the Polish translation less and less and you need to read the material in addition to just hearing it less and less. Also you’ll familiarise yourself with some of the jewels of English literature. Take twentieth century literature in order to have a more modern standard – we tend not to talk these days in the way people did in Dickens or Jane Austen, but in due course if you like the process you’ll be able to graduate to them.

If you cannot get into novels and literature, you could choose films. Films with a lot of talking in are preferable. Green Mile, Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets Society, Fight Club – these are all better than pure action movies like James Bond which will take your time up with car chases and sexy women which could more profitably be spent on language learning. The thing to do here is to get DVDs – preferably hiring them, and play about with the soundtracks and titles. Basically when the DVD was born the language lab died.

Here are the additional bits I wanted to say:

The problem which you are encountering is particularly noticeable when learning your first foreign language. Sometimes the ear is slow in reacting to the different sounds of a language, especially when being in a country for the first time and hearing native speakers when all one has had has been other more adavcned foreign learners as speakers. This training the ear to accept strange sounds is different to activation, and can take a couple of months of being in a country. Once one has “broken” this stubborn ear then for subsequent languages the problem doesn’t tend to happen.

The other thing is that as long as you have a small vocabulary, of only a few thousand words, then you will come up against unfamiliar words more often and they will put the ear off track all the more often. A vocabulary of 15,000 words or more means that you are really familiar with 99.9% of what you hear so interruptions to the flow are that much rarer and one’s ability to follow for longer periods that much easier. Therefore working on the Goldlist to gain really large vocabularies will also help the ear to become attuned.

Replies to recent questions about the Goldlist Method.

Voronezh

Voronezh. If you're looking for (<3) trouble, you've come to the right place...

Today I’ll be answering to great letters with questions in. I haven’t been able to answer all questions sent in, but these were both very good questions and admittedly in these cases you wouldn’t get to the answers from things I’ve said before now, which shows that both these guys have been paying attention, and they’ve given me a chance to add something new today that Goldlist Method users won’t necessarily have seen before and will be of potential use to quite a lot of people. If you agree, please be sure and give your 5 stars.

The following great comment appeared today from user Mistervilleneuve, who identifies himself as Jonathan, and I am motivated to answer it immediately, even though I’m painfully aware that another person also has asked for an answer – and has been waiting for ages. Hopefully I’ll do them both in this article, and my apologies to the second, who has had to have so much patience.

First Jonathan’s comment:

Dear David,

I teach English as a second language in the schools of the province of Quebec, Canada and I am also a passionate of languages. My first language is Quebecois French. I taught myself German and Russian to intermediate level and have plans to learn more.

I try to make my students as autonomous as possible, for instance instead of giving them words to learn I suggest them to write down new words they encounter on sticky yellow notes (Post-Its) and put them in view on their desk, and remove them only when they feel they know them by heart. I know that recopying words can have virtues if done right and I had a breakthrough in my mind when I discovered your Gold List videos on YOUTUBE. Your method is quite frankly the missing link I had been looking for for a long time. It ties together and gives the structure I needed to many ideas I already had about language learning. In fact, the GoldList method will now be integrated in my teaching.

I would like to better understand how exactly the self-testing should be done. I find that I am able to understand the words I want to learn (L2 to L1) but I have more difficulty to translate from my mother tongue to the language I want to learn (L1 to L2). This “one-way translation ability” has puzzled and eluded my problem-solving skills for a long time. My students also tell me that although they can understand English, when it comes the time to “produce”, they have trouble to find their words. They know they know them, but can’t recall them. And I am not any better, I can translate over a thousand Russian words, but give me the list in French or English and I am shamely not able to translate them all back in Russian.

Also, I have begun to learn Hungarian and I am developping a multiple-language learning method I like to call “Stepstones”. In essence, it is about using L2 to learn L3, then L3 to learn L4, etc. addition to everything else I use, I have a Gold List notebook of 360 pages, divided in 3 sections. The first section is the lists English–>Russian. The second section, the lists Russian–>German. The third section, the lists German–>Hungarian. I would be glad to have your educated opinion on learning more than one language at once. That being said, if by definition, a good method gives results and a better method gives the same results with less time and energy spent, I think you will not disapprove that I adapt your method to my own purposes.

I look foward to read your response, here or through email.

By the way, last Winter I spent 3 months in Voronezh to visit a Russian friend and if they say that Kiev is the city of beautiful women, Voronezh must be in very close second place :)

yours truly,

Jonathan

I’m delighted to see this reaction from someone who lives by language teaching to the Goldlist system. I have found that the number of language teachers among the small minority who don’t like the Method is quite high, and in a sense that is not surprising, as the method puts the student back in charge and not the teacher, in fact it reduces the role of teacher to coach. That is not a bad thing, we still need coaches, and sports people who achieve a lot in their fields do so because their coaches motivate them to keep going themselves, they don’t run the race for the runner. The runner doesn’t take a piggyback on the coach to get around the track, or if he did he would never become a top class athlete, but the way some language teachers conduct their lessons you will see quite the opposite.

I was reading James Heisig‘s introductions to his Remembering the Kanji books today. Not only are the Remembering the kanji books absolutely first rate as language tools (although I have done a friendly micky take in my article “Professor Huliganov’s Remembering the Romaji”, that doesn’t mean I don’t rate Heisig because I do) but also he is clearly another teacher who wants to put the student in the driving seat. And so are you, as is clear from your letters.

In fact, I was thinking of actually having Goldlist Method certification for language teachers who fulfill the following criteria:

1. They show an understanding of the Method
2. They undertake to attribute the Method to me and to make it available to all their students at no extra cost, or if they do find that it increases their revenues they should promise to share 10% of their increase with Multiple Sclerosis or Autism charities, or Red Cross disaster relief, or similar, marking their donation from Goldlist Method. The materials themselves should not be sold or attributed to anyone else
3. They undertake to enable the maximum independence to students, less teaching them the given language than teaching them to teach themselves language.
4. The qualification will be earned when twelve students of the teacher are willing to give a reference stating that the teacher taught them the method.
5. I will announce where the register will be kept, but it will enable the people who have qualified to be GoldList Method Accredited.

At the moment this is just an idea. I just think it will help along those language teachers who do the honorable thing by their students the way you do. I won’t be making any money from the initiative, but it will be a way of furthering what I think is best practice among language teachers.

Now to your very understandable question about self testing, and when to consider a word as “learned”.

I would suggest the following “rule” – a word is learned when the following things are true about it:

1. When you see the word in the target language, you know its meaning(s) – (as in all the meanings you are supposed to have learned so far, if there is a number of meanings – don’t worry if your study order doesn’t try and foresee all the possible meanings of a word – that’s not necessary and will only happen for those who are studying from a dictionary as a source, which in itself has positive and negative sides).
2. When someone says that word to you, you could write it down spelling it properly
3. From seeing it written down, you’d know how to pronounce it
4. You know all the unusual grammar exceptions applying just to that word, at least those covered in your study approach so far. So if you have, for instance, done English strong verbs as a general grammatical idea, you won’t consider “to tread” as learned until you can say “tread, trod, trodden” – but “to step” is learned as soon as you can say to yourself ‘that’s a weak verb’ when you use it.

If you know the word well enough to pass these 4 criteria, then you should be happy to distil it out.

In any event, you can always make two passes, firstly covering the target language side (that’s usually the left side) and see if you can get to the word from your learning language (I use that terminology as often it is good to use as the learning language for Goldlist another language than your own, it can serve as a great checklist for that language which was studied earlier. For instance, I use German – the Langenscheidt Czech-German pocket dictionary to be precise – for Czech, and this has become a great “Czech list” if you’ll pardon the pun, for the occasional German word which it turns out I still don’t know even after having achieved quite some fluency in German, and oll of this is pretty much like your “stepping stones” approach, which is excellent, especially if you need to learn languages that are related to each other) and then if the first pass doesn’t already render enough words for the distillation the second pass can be from target language to learning language, using the above criteria. (It’s a good idea to have them in mind for the first pass too, by the way) and then as a final option if passes one and two don’t give you enough to distil, you can combine woords in a number of ways. Some combination techniques will be included in the forthcoming book, but one thing I’ll give here as a plural is combining words to make fictional titles for notional novels, poems or other art works.

Between these two approaches you should be able to get to the point where the next distillation is going to be something like 60-75% of the preceding list. It doesn’t need to be exact and the less one distils on a given distillation, often it is easier to distil a larger proportion on the next distillation.

When I’m doing big projects on Goldlist Method, I usually plan the distillation and leave my “lumberjack marks” as it were, on the words to be left out or combined a few days before – or sometimes even weeks before – I actually come to do it. This gives an extra memory run. I wouldn’t even do the lumberjack marking run though until at least two weeks have elapsed since I made the list I’m working on. That’s the key secret of the goldlist, leaving that two weeks clearance each time so as not to be led astray by the flatterings of the short-term memory.

On the other matter you mentioned, I certainly agree about Voronezh. I fell in love there but it didn’t do me a whole lot of good. The activities of the then Soviet authorities didn’t help. If you’ve read my account at the end of the Polyglot Project by Claude Cartaginese, you’ll know something about that. You can find it in the boxfile on my LinkedIn profile.

Nice letter.

Now to the second letter which I have shockingly neglected and have to put that right with an apology:

Youtube Channelowner “Stealthanugrah” wrote the following way back in May:

 Hey brother,

I was reading in the Polyglot project your whole crazy testimony, that is one crazy life. I am really blessed to know God got a hold of your life.

Anyways to the question, how do you suggest one memorize music for longterm usage? Musicians tend to forget music quite easily after a few months etc, I’m just curious to see how you would do it.

Here’s another, when gold listing, is it ok to use a language you are intermediate in to learn another one? I am conversant in French and I am learning Spanish, is it alright to be defining Spanish words with French definitions you don’t know, to kill two birds with one stone so to speak? I think that might’ve been a problem.

One more question, how do you feel about how churches memorize songs? You know how at church we just sing them from top to bottom and then it just comes out, but when we do that, these songs tend to lose the meaning in the words they hold (at least for me), how do you suggest we memorize songs, not to mention Bible verses. Should we goldlist Bible verses, because the word of God is something quite important no? If we gold list how much should we goldlist, 25 words? Someone told me instead of reading out all the words, why not shorten the verses so that you write only the first letter of each, (which really works but for short term I’m afraid).

Sorry for making this a bit long, I’m just really curious to see your perspective on all this, and I hope that you’ll answer this on your next blog post.

When we talk about the long-term memory of music, Brother, I think that in the main we remember the way tunes go. If we become very proficient at our instruments, we should be able to play from memory as we can sing from memory. In the main most people haven’t got such big problems singing songs from the long-term memory as they do when playing on a guitar or keyboard. If you are really in command of your instrument and of musical theory that should be the best way of ensuring that long-term memory works, and then the other thing would be to play them a little and often, for pleasure and not to try to learn them or cram them up for a concert. You will always need a bit of last minute practice just to “activate” to concert level, but as with language three days should be optimal for that, if you knew the piece well before.

Expecting always to be able to play without errors at the drop of a hat is a wrong expectation like being able to spark off fluently in a language someone hasn’t spoken for months. The long term memory is great as so many things fit in it, it seems fit to last us for a thousand years of memories, not just a hundred, but we have to accept that it’s neither natural nor necessary for everything in their to be active at once. The three day rule is part of the God given design of our minds, to activate something, to effectively bring about a change in our state of mind. It also reflects the way our Lord was three days as Jonah in the belly of the great fish. Our bodies are full of natural reminders of Biblical truths.

Your second question I think I answered above  when talking to Jonathan – it’s a very good thing to use one language to learn another, and if the new language is related closely to a language you learned before then it’s more than a good thing, it is the best way to avoid interference and the deleterious effect of the new language on the old, as it will highlight for you careful attention the differences between the languages. You can use internet bookstores to get any number of books that speakers of your older studied language would use to learn the new one.

Now onto the use of Goldlist for spiritual purposes. I would contend that Churches, in simply singing the songs or hymns on a regular basis as well as in NOT trying to force people to learn them, but by rehearsing them out on a regular basis in a stress free way, actually give people the best chance of long-term memorizing them. If people want to learn a favoured hymn they can use the Goldlist method to good effect – indeed they could to learn a secular poem if they wanted to, but personally I’d advise any minister against imposing either the method or a tempo for it from the pulpit. If ever the day came where I learned that someone was imposing goldlist on someone else as a religious service, I would be deeply saddened by it.

When trying to learn any favorite hymn, you’ll find that most verses you know, it is a question of remembering the least favorite verses and also the seques to new ideas. In  a rhyming couplet, I wouldn’t have to say too many syllables of a known hymn before someone who had sung it on numerous occasions could finish the couplet, but he or she might then have difficulty remembeing the bit that comes next.

The above also applies to Scripture. Memorising scripture gives the Christian a source of great strength and guidance, especially in the fight against sin. David says “Thy Word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against Thee”, and Dwight L. Moody said “either the Bible will keep me from my sin or my sin will keep me from the Bible”. The problem is really to decide which places to start. I personally don’t like to prefer any part of the Bible above another as God can use even the geneologies and the Levitical laws to speak to people’s hearts, and there is nothing that is not relevant to study, even things which we no longer strive to adhere to in the Age of Grace.

Writing out a thousand page book into the goldlist method and distilling it would be a very long process – far longer than learning languages, and there may well be easier ways to learn Scripture. You could record yourself reading it – maybe put up on YT to help others to, and then listen to it back. Or listen to someone else reading it, but on a regular basis. I’d be inclined to use Goldlist for the memorising of passages you especially want to know well, like the “Romans Road” verses for evangelism, some key psalms, or some of the more rich passages of where Christ is speaking such as the Sermon on the Mount, the High Priestly Prayer in John 17, or some of the beautiful doxology and sermons and passages from the letters of Paul, the peon to faith in Hebrews, the hard parts of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation that repay the most meticulous study. I would also suggest it for any parts where God has blessed you and you decided to memorise the passage but find it elusive.

You can also use it for study around the Bible, to learn names of protagonists, places, and the dates that things happened.

Don’t make a work out of it, though. It’s purpose should be to actually put LESS work into the memorising of things you were wanting to memorise anyway. And may God add His blessing to your study of His Word.

Incidentally, August 2011 starts tomorrow and I am going to make that a Blitz Month – with record numbers of postings – mainly of the older YouTube material that I was planning to have up here by now but time was not available. I hope that subscribers with enjoy this “Summer Special” – each of the films will be commented with a bit of extra information I didn’t put onto YouTube, as well as feature some of the most interesting comments received from viewers so far.

Why Omphalism (Mature Earth Creationism) isn’t an immoral doctrine.

Wedding at Cana

Wedding at Cana - by Bret Arnett via Flickr

I was discussing Genesis on Linked-In‘s Christian Professionals Worldwide Group, although I have stopped it and left the Group as some of my posts which had taken time to prepare were deleted without prior warning by the Moderators, which is not the way I care to engage in debate.

That is absolutely no reflection on the Brother who wrote privately to me with a discussion about Answers In Genesis. When I wrote the big piece below it would not pass through the Linked In private message limit, so I decided to place it here so as to share the thoughts here with my dear readers as well as be able to answer this Brother in full. I will call him Brother in Arizona unless he asks me to identify him. He’s not obliged to as he came in private correspondence, and in order to share the good discussion his note provoked, I will at least keep him anonymous unless he should choose otherwise, in which case I can always edit it and identify him if he prefers it.

The first note this Brother sent was

Hello David, it’s ******  here!

Thought I’d reply personally and privately on your previous post.

Sorry, but I couldn’t disagree with you any more on the subject of Ken Ham and his organizations.  I believe he has a heart for God, but also believe he is guilty of bending the evidence to fit his theories.  Frankly, I think he does more harm than good to the rational defence of Christianity.  We’ve met; he registers high on my “kook meter.”

But, then again, I might register high on your kook scale, too!

Blessings to you,

(Brother in Arizona)

I wrote the following non-commital reply:

The evidence is the same for us and for the evolutionists, it is all down to interpretation.

Either you believe one interpretation, or the other. Simple as that.

His response was then a bit more detailed as to what bothers him about Ken Ham’s approach

Right you are, Davey!

Part of what I don’t appreciate about Ham’s approach in explaining the apparent age of the universe is his assertion that God created a “mature” universe, just like he created a mature Adam & Eve.  Seems to me that it’s accusing God of fooling us; giving the apparence of an old earth when it’s really young.  Why would He do that?  Isn’t it more likely that we misunderstood the scriptures?  We might also misunderstand the science, but there are many different disciplines, all agreeing on an old earth & universe.

As Christians, I think we fall right into our enemy’s plan when we spend so much time arguing on what six days means.  Instead, I believe we should unite and call attention to all the problems with evolution.  As more becomes known about biochemistry, Darwin’s ideas become increasingly suspect.  The Darwinists are a secular religion, and they’re on the run.  They’ve been spinning the evidence lately in creative ways, in order to support their theories.  Which is exactly what I think Ken Ham does.

I have no problem believing in an ancient earth/universe; where “time” was not so important as the phases of creation.  God created each species distinctly; they have adapted over time, but not changed from one species to another.  The tide of scientific evidence increasingly is suggesting Intelligent Design and ancient earth.  Always believed in the former, but was surprised when I reconsidered the latter.

Really glad our salvation hangs on none of this!  And grateful that we can reason with one another.  We may not persuade the other, but the discussion brings more clarity to both views.  A radio-mentor of mine likes to say, “I prefer clarity to agreement.”

Blessings to you, Davey, and may God continue to bless us both with more clarity!

Well, as you can imagine, this well-written and cogent message was worth a far more expansive response than my initial one, and so here is the long reply – which Linked-In’s system couldn’t take, and then I brought it here. At that point I also redacted it slightly for the blog readership, hence references to this blog inside it, which were put in at the end.

Dear Brother,

The objection that you have to the mature Earth approach is exactly that which most of the Christian community had to Philip Henry Gosse’s Omphalism when he first expounded it. In the end Gosse became ostracised – even from his own family – for proposing a God who “deceives” us with fossils, etc. They all said that a God who would hide Himself as implicit in Omphalism or Gosseism, as they put it, was immoral, despite the fact that Scripture itself warns that God sends “strong delusion” that peopl should love and believe a lie. He also hardens the heart of Pharaoh and of others, or blinds their eyes. It is in His sovereignty – He is Potter, we the clay. many people don’t like the idea of that and see themselves as Potter (or Weasley, or Grainger, depending on taste) and God they see as the clay, to be moulded as suits their philosophical fancy.

Personally, I think P. H. Gosse had it basically right and Ham has it basically right, and I’d like to tell you why.

When God made the world already old and put an already mature man and woman in it (he didn’t make them as babies) even having navels although they were not born (omphalos means ‘navel’ hence the term ‘omphalism’ for a world created as if it had been there a long time before), they both knew very well that they were made from the dust. They themselves had no childhood memories, they had language implanted and didn’t remember learning the words from their parents as we do and they were aware that there had been no-one but them at the beginning, they had spoken with God personally.

They lived for 900 plus years and will have told their story to hundreds of thousands of people – their children, grandchildren and great great great great great great grandchildren – all the people who lived then. And nevertheless people ignored God because they hadn’t seen him for themselves. Faith is ordained to come by hearing, and not by sight, and salvation is by faith – so God made it right from the beginning that men and women could come to faith by hearing or could choose to reinterpret what they saw around them in a different way.

After God destroyed the earth by a Flood and personally spoke to Moses afterwards and said “go forth and multiply”, his sons and their families knew without the need for faith from hearing (they had had their chance to be faithful prior to the Flood and had already passed that test) that God had acted in an almighty intervening way, and certainly was who he said he was. But within about 6 or 7 generations you have people already largely ignoring what they heard passed down about that from generation to generation and would have been going “Flood? what Flood? it’s impossible! They must have simply had a local Flood and exaggerated it”.

You can see where this is going; the same story at Babel where everyone alive experiences the breaking of language. The same at Peleg with the splitting of the continents, the same with the people of Israel at the parting of the Red Sea, the pillar of fire and smoke and the manna in the wilderness. It happens again and again in the Bible. God intervenes and everyone knows – without the need for Faith that comes by hearing, that He is who He says He is. But afterwards those who didn’t see it with their own eyes are supposed to believe what they have heard, without seeing.

In order for them to have the ability to accept God in Faith there has to be a credible alternative. If there is nothing that makes any kind of sense but to believe in God then the only way to test people’s faith is to put them through trials, as we see in Job. But God is merciful and gentle, and instead of putting humanity through such trials as Job had on the basis of every person, He makes the test for most of the people who have ever lived (the vast majority of which are in the post-Darwinian period and who have to choose between a secular and a God-centred world view when the ‘scientific’ consensus is supporting a secular view) in that faith in God as Creator is not obvious. It becomes quite a leap of faith to believe in what God tells us in His word about Creation when we are bombarded with apparently clever people bringing what looks like evidence that the universe could have made itself impersonally.

God has hidden Himself from plain sight so that He can address the hearts of men and women and call them to Christ by faith, the faith that comes by hearing and the word of God as it says. The billions of years that it would have taken a world like this to evolve without almighty Divine agency (which actually are not enough, if you look at what is actually involved in the process of abiogenesis the chances of which happening alone are vanishingly small and the world is not big enough, nor even the universe, and ten times the time they think there was since the Big Bang – which regularly gets revised anyway – for the mathematics that are invoved just to get the necessary group of proteins together to produce the simplest viable life and get the chain of evolution started), those years are only notional. God tells us that He did it for us, and therefore there was really no need to hang around for all that time. God was able to make the light from stars millions of light years away hit the maturely created Earth and at the same time the star itself may already have had its supernova, but the light from that is still on its way. God made it this way and pretty much tells us that’s how he did it. And He will do it again for the new heavens and earth, and we won’t have to wait around for billions of years for that to appear either, although when it does appear it will be perfect and mature.

I agree with you that Creationism is not a Doctrine critical for salvation, but if someone rejects the idea of God’s intervening might in Creation, why would they not have the same doubts about God’s intervening might for the Resurrection world, the new heavens and earth? And if we don’t have the Resurrection, we are, as Paul says, of ‘all men most miserable’. That’s why I worry for non-Creationist Christians. I don’t want them to discover one day that they lack the faith to carry on, and give up in depression and misery. Which does in fact happen. I’m certainly not judging them. I would believe the same if God had not kindly opened my undeserving and unworthy eyes to His full power and creative glory.

Eyewitnesses of God’s miracles passed it to those in their family and friends, but it was rejected against the alternative that sight offered and men preferred to believe, but God
has always given us alternatives. We have been put here to believe, most especially in Christ, but in Him as both Redeemer and Creator. First God is interested in whether we will come to Him in Faith about what He has handed down to us by hearing (which includes reading) rather than the empirical “evidence” of sight, and experiment. And once we have faith, then God will test that Faith. People get trials for their faith on an almost daily basis, but thanks to the prevalence of the theory of evolution, some of these trials merely involve enduring the mockery of the world, although the Theory of Evolution inspired both Nazism and Communism, which have offered Christians far more serious trials.

Creationism is very often not served by some of the people who propound it, but AiG is, in my view, one of the better ones out there. That’s why I have their RSS feed continually on the side bar of this blog, and I pray that God blesses that and that these meagre efforts of mine might point some people there to have their preconceptions about the Origin challenged.

I want to leave you with one image – the place were Jesus shows us exactly how He did it. The wedding at Cana. That was Jesus first miracle in His earthly ministry, and so naturally we could even almost expect it to be a reflection of His initial work in creating the earth. When he turns the water into wine at Cana he doesn’t make new wine – he makes mature, vintage wine, which the guests then accuse the bridegroom of leaving the best till last when everyone knows that you put the best wine on the table first so that it can be appreciated while the guests are still fresh. You put the non-mature wines out afterwards, when the guests are, well if not tipsy then at least sated and their taste buds are less fussy. Such received wisdom existed  at the time, as we see from the account in the economy of words that are used there. But the detail has much meaning – we are being shown that when Jesus for His first miracle, His Creation-reflecting miracle, changed water into wine He produced mature wine and not new wine. He who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

God bless,

Davey

Should anyone be remotely interested there is a lot of newsgroup material from talk.origins group in which I talk about Omphalism and my own take on it, which I called “Omphalism-Lite”. The idea of Omphalism-Lite ties into my views on memory and its importance and centrality to language and thought, and therefore Omphalism Lite posits that God did not place as mature in this world anything involving human memory, including collective memories such as cultural artefacts.

Fossils I said may largely have resulted from the two large scale events, namely the Flood and the Dividing of Continents. First I thought that these were parts of one event and later on I started to think that the Flood and the Dividing of Continents were in different times. These days I don’t really have a problem with the fossils even being an “omphalos” under Omphalism Lite, because they are not a human cultural memory but a geological memory, which is perfectly entitled to reflect notional time.

In any event, if my take on the subject has interested you, googling on “Omphalism Lite” should give you more.

True to Type?

Photo of keyboard and pen

The pen is mightier than the board

Over on YouTube this morning, a viewer called Fightingnate commented on the  second Goldlist film  with the following very good question:

How do you not think you use muscle memory for typing on a keyboard? how do you think some people can type 100 wpm? Why do you think there are typing lessons and programs? Typing (if you type correctly and efficiently) requires just as much memory as writing.

I knew immediately that the answer to this question was going to go well beyond 500 letters (more than 500 words, for that matter) so I left there a request to look the answer up here and I hope the asker and some others who are interested will read it here, and also commenting at length of desired is easier here, as long as you have a wordpress account, or have something like facebook or one of the other methods for logging in here.

I am ready to admit that there are memory functions associated with typing. It’s a perfectly valid observation that there are lessons and programs to learn typing which certainly require the use of memory, including long-term memory and the long-term memory will certainly be involved in learning to type.

Whether it “requires just as much memory as writing” as you claim I would suggest is an unfounded statement. It may be true or it may not be, I am uncertain that it can even be measured reliably. However what I would say is that even if typing is more demanding on the memory than stylus writing is, that still wouldn’t make it optimal for language learning to the long-term memory.

In a sense you might take as an analogy that using GPS will still engage your memory, but working things out with an old fashioned map may be a more natural way of remembering how to get to a place. Typing numbers into a calculator may help you churn numbers out faster at the cashier’s equivalent of the secretary’s standard of 100 wpm, but whether it really helps you retain the parts of maths that need to be rote learned as well as paper and pencil calculations do, well, I doubt it.

Learning to the long-term memory is, I believe, done best when we are not giving to our brains signals that we are making efforts to learn, and not making our brains feel as if they are working. A more relaxed way of writing is preferable. Maybe for Generation Y-ers and Z-ers you feel more relaxed writing in typing than in stylus writing, but that is a bit unnatural. The way of writing with a stylus developed thousands of years ago, if you include knives and brushes as well as pens and pencils in that class of implements, and it was developed in a sense “naturally” in a form basically dictated by the biological shape of the human hand as well as the workings of the human brain. The keyboard layout on the other hand is an attempt to impose a certain predictated logic onto a flat surface and in a sense we have to use an extra layer of effort and memory to remember where, in two dimensional space, a letter is. In a sense the typist can remember the shape of the word and will find that enduring typoes bear witness to the fact that memory – if at times erroneous memory – is involved in that process. But you are only feeling keys. You are not feeling a word being crafted by your hand against the paper. There is no big difference between the feel of one key and another.

The keyboard restricts the movement of your body to one place, while in stylus writing you are moving your hand forward (even in right to left or other systems that still counts as forward) across the sheet. You can also move your body in relation to the writing more easily. You can hold the book at more different angles and in different positions. You can grasp the pen and book from a standing start or take it with you anywhere far more easily than the computer. Even the tiny computers which we now call telephones bear testimony in their new stylus-imitating input methods that the keyboard is not the most relaxed or efficient way of doing things.

Even when the speed typist sits and types her 100 wpm, or his in order not to be sexist, and shows up a certain advantage keyboard writing can have over stylus writing at high speeds, can the substance of what is being typed be remembered just as well as with the typist or handwriter going at much lower speeds? I venture to suggest not. The long-term memory is a subconscious sampler – that’s a key tenet of the Goldlist method and if it were not so then the whole system wouldn’t work. But what determines the sampling rate? Is it the same rate at high speeds or is it a sample of so many passes per second regardless of the amount of material? We don’t know for sure, but I believe that the way perception works will make it a bit of both. You certainly remember more details of a street when you walk down it than when you drive down it, but the ratio of details remembered to time spent could well be lower on the walk, as at slow pass speeds some items will be sampled more than once.

Pen writing doesn’t fade like a screen when you work on it in the sun. You don’t need electricity and you can carry the book with far less weight on a walk. Writing languages in it which are full of diacritics, or writing in Japanese or other character-based languages will be for more English-speaking learners far easier to do. And most of all it will be personal. Your handwriting is special because it is your personal body language in paper form. For literacy, handwriting something rather than typing it is the equivalent to saying something with your own voice instead of letting off a recording of somone else saying it, and just listening. The printed page may be all your words but your body language has not melded with the language as it does with the handwritten page. You do not become one with it. And that is why the specific memory aid that comes with that melding and crafting of the written words in writing as nice as you can make it and done with a sense of the pleasure derived from such craftsmanship, is not really delivered by the process of typing.

Most of us do a lot of typing, sone of us are even threatened with Repetitive Stress Injury from the amount we do, and also we have fewer and fewer occasions to cultuivate the hand and as a result when we need nice handwriting it evades us. The insistence on having Goldlist Method a handwritten method is not anti-machine – it simply reminds us that there is an alternative to the machine and that the computer is not the only tool when it comes to language learning – even a language learning method that bases on a quite mathematical algorithm.

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