Blog Archives
Plans for 2013
I thought I would just round off the year’s blogging personally, rather than just with the machine generated summary in the previous post which is very interesting, maybe more so for me than for the readers, just to give you all my warmest wishes for 2013 and to hope that I may continue to be part of what you look at online in the coming year. Your ratings and comments and hits, both here and on Quoracy.com blog and also on the YouTube channel, on Linked-In and Facebook and several other places are all very highly appreciated and at times of crisis I do derive a certain strength from knowing that I’ve still got my readers, at least I got my friends:
In the deliciously ironic video to this interesting recent hit, the girl’s friend is a robot, but in my case behind the robot face of the internet and it’s various interfaces are real people who have been willing to share a bit in my life by watching the videos, listening to the voice droning on, reading the posts and the comments. That means a lot to me, and some of you I’ve got to know as well as people I’ve spent time with in the same room, or better.
I didn’t manage to do as much as I wanted to in 2012, partly because I always set my plans too high anyway, but also because I had a bad round of pneumonia in the summer which wiped out July and August. Read the rest of this entry
A conversation with a Russian learner about aspects of verbs.
English: Native language in Ukraine. Legend: Ukrainian language dominates as the native language Russian language dominates as the native language. Bi-lingual, with a slight Ukrainian language lead (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
One of the followers of the video content on YouTube, Dennis, wrote asking about the question of aspects. I answered as I could and also as you will see got his permission to share the conversation so that more language learners would be able to take advantage of the topic.
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Conversation started Thursday
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Dear David,
Thank you so much of the add. I’m honored!
I’m a very big fan of your youtube videos concerning the Russian language. I use them in addition of my Russian language course and I ust say that they give me a headstart of the rest. So they really help!
I was wondering however if you could tell me which video talks about the time aspect ( поличать vs поличить) if you know what I mean with that. We talked about it yesterday in class and most people (including myself) find it very difficult.I hope you can help me out with this one.
Thank you so much in advance!
Dennis Meurders Read the rest of this entry
On the Waterfront at Cape Town (South Africa Series 2/10)
| Playout date: | 12 November 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Cape Town, South Africa, Victoria and Albert Waterfront |
| Other people featured: | Performers on the waterfront |
| Genre: | Walking with camera |
| Music used: | “This could be heaven for everyone” by Queen – Karaoke version |
| Languages used: | English with some singing in a Bantu language |
| Animals featured: | Red wing starlings Onychognathus morio |
This series, possibly beginning with this one, even though it is the 102nd video uploaded to YouTube, marks a certain development in the way I presented the video material. The cutting in of background music, the use of a common intro for series, the gallery shots with background music. This is an early prototype of about 2 or 3 hundred similarly style films from travel to different places. It’s not exactly the mode I settled into, but it’s well on the way there.
One thing I quite like about this one looking back is the attempt to use music in the backing track together with the ambient noises, like the drums of the waterfront performers here on the Victoria and Albert Waterfront in Cape Town. I have great memories of this place and would be happy to go to Cape Town again if ever I get the chance.
Apart from anything else, there were friendships made there which gave me a lot of value in my life. Just that alone, even if it had been nothing like the paradise it was, would have been well worth the trip.
Related articles
- Eating my way around Cape Town, South Africa – Guest Blogger Hg2 (mrsoaroundtheworld.com)
#3 Numa Fan muckaround
| Playout date: | 22 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | Sophie |
| Genre: | Family, musical muckaround |
| Music used: | |
| Languages used: | Romanian, English |
| Animals featured: | None |
Early YT legend (and one of my sources) Brookers did a muckaround video called #1 Numa fan, to which someone else called Ognog responded with #2 and this was intended as a response to that, although right now that film has faded into obscurity with only 70 thousand hits to Brookers’ 7 million for the original muckabout, and this one by is only had 700. Leading to the observation that you loose two zeroes off the end whenever you go back one “generation” in spoofing something. Only one in a hundred people actually look at responses, it would seem!
What this all is is part of that whole craze from about 5 years back about the so-called “Numa” song. It was actually “Dragostea din tei” or “Love from the linden trees” by Hajducii, or the Outlaws, a Romanian group who managed to become the Summer hit of the year with this dancey tune. The lyrics to the chorus go “Vrei sa pleci dar nu ma, nu ma iei, nu ma nu ma nu me iei” and the repetition of “nu ma” gave the song its English name. It’s a bit like the Japanese hit Sukiyaki, which received that name as nobody could say “Ue wo muite arukou”.
The chorus in Romanian actually means “You want to leave, but you are not taking me” and the nu ma is ‘Not me’, so that it sounds like the “not me” song.
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- Dangerous Hot Romanian Nurses Threaten UK: Lord Winston (pamil-visions.net)
Chateaux Drive
The big picture - we only saw a handful of the total available!
Occasionally these blog posts will contain more than one video – especially if the video is one item which was split up into separate items as this day chasing chateaux in the Loire Valley was split up in order to keep them on HD in YouTube.
They are all one day out, and they can best be enjoyed from beginning to end as one piece, hence putting them into a single post.
I don’t always do this, but sometimes I just feel like it.
OK, so here are the videolinks in order of their appearance:
Enjoy!
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- Amboise on the Loire (wcs4.blogspot.com)
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- Most viewed YouTube video hits 600 Million views (techarisma.com)
- YouTube Edu restructured (explainingmaths.wordpress.com)
True to Type?
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.
Related articles
- You should learn to type (properly) (skilldrick.co.uk)
- Handy to know… (huliganov.tv)
- The Pen & Paper: the most underrated creativity and productivity tool (thenextweb.com)
- Make Your iPad A True Writing Tool With These Notebook Apps (makeuseof.com)
- Tips on How to Type Faster (computer-realm.net)
The Watchtower Trilogy
Follow the money...
Here is the series of three recent Watchtower (so-called “Jehovah’s Witnesses”) films I made on three consecutive Sundays recently.
In this one, I had received a surprise call from two ladies wanting to talk about the Bible, but not initially identifying their organisation. On impulse, I just grabbed the camera and filmed this discussion covertly on the balcony.
It finished off as you can tell with my challenge for them to return. They probably would not have come back at all without my telling them that they wouldn’t and using their desire to prove me wrong, but of course when they did come back for round to they pulled in reinforcements. Katie wasn’t allowed to have a second dose of truth, but Peter the Elder stood in for her, and he is much heavier duty artilliery, that’s why he’s an Elder…
In any event Peter wasn’t allowing discussion of certain matters or he would have walked out. He also was in no mood to return for another helping the following week, so the last in the series is me on my own telling the things that he wasn’t going to let me put to him and still remain in situ.
Anyway, if anyone would like more information on the origins of Watchtower and its connections with other unwholesome things, the best source is Fritz Springmeier‘s book “The Watchtower and the Masons”. I’m not stating that I necessarily agree with Fritz in all aspects or align myself with him, but the arguments made in there are the ones that people seeking to exonerate C T Russell need to deal with. The book is available for free in various parts of the internet.
The above films caused a strong desire on the part of some JWs to debate, and of course that all came up against the threading issues in YouTube, and the wordcount limit. My suggestion is that if you want to debate at further length, this is a better place to do so as it should be threading properly and allow you to say everything you need to say in response to the films. I am not trying to censor debate by you Watchtower on the films – quite the opposite! And you’ll still be able to comment there, nobody has been squelched, but I will place a link to this article in the descriptions of those films stating that the comments to this article here in Huliganov TV are the preferred place. You will need a wordpress account to make the most of it, but that is free. You can comment without being a wordpress registered user, but you have less functionality, so I recommend doing so if you can.
Several people, whose identities I won’t reveal, have contacted me privately seeking Jesus Christ after these films. All Christians watching, please pray for these people to be saved and reach assurance of salvation, and also for the people I’ve been speaking to in the films, that they will come out of darkness and error into rightful understanding of the person and work of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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- Jehovah’s Witnesses hold conventions in Gwinnett. (jwitness.wordpress.com)
- Canada: Thousands gather for Watchtower convention. (jwitness.wordpress.com)
- Jehovah’s Witnesses to hold 7-weekend ‘Let God’s Kingdom Come!’ convention in Amherst. (jwitness.wordpress.com)
A request for further information about the Goldlist Method by a learner of German
Strutz's funky stuff: the cover of "501 German Verbs"
I am only now coming to answer a query that has been waiting for eight weeks, as things are so busy at work. The following letter came to me on YouTube on 2nd May from Mr K.M.
Hello sir, (Apologies, I truly don’t know how I should address you (Mr. Huliganov, Uncle Davey) anyway, I must firstly say that I greatly admire you as a person and am so happy that I discovered you. Quite a while ago, you were nice enough to translate a video in Russian for me (just a note for later: I’m not learning Russian) which I greatly appreciated.
Now I come to you seeking more serious help with something. Language learning with the Goldlist system. The problems I’m having with getting started with the Goldlist system are directly related to organizational matters. Now, just what do I mean by that? Well, I feel that it might be prudent to learn words through variety but with some type of organization (nouns, verbs, prepositions…) Is this even necessary? I’m sorry if I haven’t seen a video or read an article or blog about what I’m asking. Do you think I should just go through my dictionary to pick words and leave it at that? Overall, how should I easily select and organize words? I’m dead serious about learning with the Goldlist system, it’s just those first few steps that are the hardest. Getting started. Really getting into it. I sincerely thank you for your time.
I then sent this gentleman an email as follows:
Perhaps you could tell me what languages you know, what you are learning and what your objectives and targets for this language are. Then also some words on what your materials are that you have chosen in order to learn it. That way, I’ll be able to explain how to get the most from my memory method in those circumstances.
The response from 4th May was as follows:
Well, I am a fluent English speaker, and I’m learning Deutsch. Just for the sake of telling you more about myself as as a person, as you and I most definitely share a love for languages (me on a much less professional and scholarly level than you however
), I have learned a fair amount about other languages (what group which language belongs to, the overall sound of it as a language, as well as multiple aspects of the grammar etc…) But anyways, I am most serious about learning Deutsch. My family is from Deutschland, and most of my family still lives there, so I’ve been going my whole life to visit family etc. After much time and thought, I am now seriously considering moving to Deutschland.
You may now be wondering, why don’t I already know Deutsch? Well the reasons are simple, My father has traveled quite frequently throughout my childhood for work, allowing less time for him to teach me, and my mother comes from a Scottish family. Luckily, my father travels less now, which gives he and I more time to practice pronunciation (which I am good at because of the fact that I’ve been listening to it my whole life). That’s the main thing I’ve been practising with him, reading, and allowing him to correct me. And more recently, both of us taking turns reading the passage(s), and he, on his turn, translating. So he is certainly a good resource that I have for which I am incredibly thankful. However, (and I’m of course sure you’ll understand) I do not regard him as a resource that is consistently dependable and overall best for myself. Please do not however think that I want to completely dismiss him as a resource. I’d just like to learn on my own as much as I can for independency-related reasons (I’m sure you know what I mean). I still will always ask him a question, etc.
As for what level of fluency I’m serious about working to achieve, I’d like to work towards the following things as my goal:
- natural flow in speech and pronunciation
- ability to freely expound on anything that gets brought up in conversation, or what I’d like to speak about
- a fair-sized vocabulary
- a good understanding of the grammar
- reading skills that are almost better than I possess in English if not betterPerhaps completely fluent would be the shorter answer. Now I ABSOLUTELY MUST clarify that I see the above goals as long-term and strongly feel that I’ve thought enough about it all to say that I don’t think I have unrealistic expectations. But it’s as simple as this: I am very serious about it, who knows where my studies will take me…
As for written materials, I have the following reference books:
German An Essential Grammar by Bruce Donaldson
501 German Verbs by Henry Strutz
Cassel’s German-English/English German Dictionary Two copies, one new one, and an older one from 1965 that belonged to my grandmother while she was learning English
As well as Coversational German of Cortina Method
I also have various Deutsch books spanning many genres such as poetry, history and classic literature (Herman Hesse etc.) just lying around the house which I can use.
So, there you are. Work your magic!
Once again, I sincerely thank you for your time
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a great deal of time, but quite rightly Mr K.M. reminded me that I had promised an answer and so here we are with the best answer I can give to this worthy query.
The question is not entirely dissimilar to some things asked by Cheryl in the video which you can find by searching on “Cheryl” within this blog. However, what I will do is add to this and give a full strategy for learning German from English at the position you appear to be now.
I would make the assumption that your German grammar could do with a refresh from the start so I would work through the Donaldson book and goldlist that. You might kick off before everything else by just working through the Michel Thomas audio course – it won’t take long and some things will be plainer to you after working through that and for that you don’t yet need to put pen to paper.
In my opinion you don’t need to goldlist all the verbs book or even start goldlisting the dictionary. Just go through the Donaldson book and then try some literature. You can either use google translate for a quick translate or better still buy or download an English translation of the literature. You mention you have Hesse lying around. Well, Siddartha and a few other novels by Hermann Hesse in English is available as a free of charge epub on feedbooks if you have an Android phone with the Aldiko bookreader. You can save dictionary time, which is boring, by using the translation.
It works like this:
a) you first read a paragraph or two of the German paper original with a pencil or other marker in your hand. You underline the words you don’t know,
b) you then transfer these words to the left side of a new Goldlist (“headlist”),
c) you then read the translation, noting the meanings of the words in the translation, and adding them to the right of the German in the headlist,
d) read again the German original, understanding it fully now that the words are in place. Always seek foremost to enjoy the original literature, don’t treat it as a memorizing exercise or it will cease to be one. Seek to admire the use of language by the author, and be enriched by it.
e) you can consult the dictionary if there’s something more you need to know about the word. For German you might need for instance to be sure of some of the following
- for nouns, the gender, if that’s not clear from the shape of the word
- for verbs, where they are separable or not, whether they are declined weak or strong and what the past tense and participle are if strong, as well as any umlauting in the second and third persons singular of the present tense. This is where your verb book comes in.
- for prepositions, what case they are governing in the sentence and why.
f) if the sentence has word order you don’t understand, you can write out the whole sentence and its explanation as a line item. You are also able to take out quotes or expressions you like and want to memorize as line items into the headlist
g) afterwards, progress the headlist as normal, which means to distill it at the most frequent after a two week break.
h) whenever you wish to have more fluency and “activate” the German, either go to Germany or have German speakers nearby so that you wake up and activate all your German in just three days. Resist the temptation to judge your progress by how conversationally fluent you feel. That’s about degree of activation, not depth of knowledge.
Good luck, and please let us know how you get on.
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Announcing the Huliganov TV Summer contributors’ competition!
Jul 8
Posted by Viktor D. Huliganov
Volume also helps, but is less important than quality
As announced in today’s video uploaded on YouTube, I have produced some Huliganov.TV pens, five of which will be given to the five best contributors over the next 30 days (ie to the 7th August).
Winners will be announced the day after the contest, and if you’re one of the winners, to receive your prize you only need to provide their address and I’ll send the pen there.
The best contributors will be judged on the basis of quality, thought-provoking responses and comments on either the previously existing or the fresh articles that will be appearing daily over the competition period. Volume also helps, but is less important than quality so spamming or simple repetitive commenting or “me too” style comments won’t earn much by way of points. Especially helpful points like feedback that can help make this whole thing better, collaborations or even referrals of your friends here will count in addition to the comment contributions.
Discussion can be on any of the topics in the articles here.
I am hoping to get some interaction going on here between my group of friends on YT. You never know when YT can simple pull the plug on your account for no apparent reason, and from one day to the next people have been known to lose contact with all the friends they made on YT. Copyright strikes or other strikes are easy to acquire and notoriously hard to work off… This way, if people get used to coming here from time to time, the party goes on even if that happens. Also the ability to have properly threaded discussions without the character limit could enable people do to a lot more than they can when trying to discuss in YT. That’s why it’ll be particularly good if discussions kick off here between contributors, not always just between individual visitors and me, like I was the middle of some exotic flower and you all the petals…
Hope to see a real “summer flowering” of this blog, and hope we all have fun and learn something.
Related articles
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Tags: Arts, blog, comments, comments competition, competition, Summer, YouTube