Gold List Method for Scripture Memorisation
Man shall not live by bread alone…
Greetings gentle readers after a long lapse in posting.
I was recently contacted in e-mail by a Christian polyglot some of my readers will know personally from Gatherings, Brother Fiel Sahir, who wrote:
Hi David! I did some googling but maybe I messed up and I haven’t found where you’ve discussed this, but have you further developed the GLM for scripture memorization? I know for a fact that you were goldlisting sentences when I met you, but what I recall was you used those sentences to help you remember a focus word rather than the sentence itself. Just something interesting, because a friend of mine has encouraged me to begin memorizing scripture. A spiritual discipline that is definitely underated and under practiced in my opinion, first and foremost by myself. Anyways, I look forward to your response, but a blogpost would be more beneficial to the world, so I await that as well! Thanks David. I hope to see you around soon!
In response to this, I wrote the following:
Dear Br. Fiel,
Anything which is to be learned to the Long Term Memory can best be learned using GLM. My suggestion would be to select a passage which you would like to be able to repeat verbatim, at any time later in you life, and place it into the headlist with let us say no more than five words per line.
- The Lord is my shepherd
- I shall not want. He
- Maketh me to lie down in
- Green pastures, he leadeth me
- Beside the quiet waters. He
- Restoreth my soul…
Etc.
When you have left this two weeks as with any other GoldList project, if it is a passage you already substantially knew, but are trying to get word perfect I would try to write it on D1 position as accurately as possible, but in pencil, covering the original over on the left side. Here you can write maybe seven words at a time. Then note any mistakes you made, in the little words, bits missed out altogether, punctuation, if that’s something you want to get right too, verse numbers (which I didn’t include in the example, but if you ant to be able to remember them, then pay attention to that) and highlight those errors with a red pen or highlighter. Your 25 lines will now anyway be 17 lines just by dint of writing 7 words instead of 5 at D1.
Obviously that’s not a strategy that can continue indefinitely, so at D2 you will take a slightly different approach. You will probably not try to write out the whole from memory at D2, but instead write out the parts where you had had a problem before. The bits where you had no problem, just write the first letter of each word. Write tightly, allowing as many words per line as is comfortable.
Remember you are leaving at least two weeks again between D1 and D2, and the same when you turn D2 to D3, but here you can simply leave out and not even write the first letter of words if you know that you remember confidently the whole sentence. In order to remember the flow of idea in a longer passage, consider writing the first and last words in each clause, and maybe with abbreviations.
- The Lord..want, he maketh..gpast,he leadeth beside tqw. Restoreth.
That may well be where you are by D3 or D4, with 6 lines now looking like a single line.
And you can carry on that way. So, please let me know how you get on. And since you asked for a blogpost, I will base one on your query and my answer. Can I use your name and text?
To which Fiel responded that I could. And thanks to his query and willingness to let me share, we have here something which I hope will encourage many of you to try a project of GLM for long term memorization of a holy text.
Even if you are not Bible believing, you can probably try it on the Qur’aan or on some poetry you want to rote learn for life. I recommend Scripture though. It is what David said needed to be “hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee”, and if this tool can help towards the hiding of Divine words in the heart, I don’t know what higher thing can be said of the GoldList Method.
Putting the “anal” back into “analysis”. A thought experiment on the lexical flexibility of conlangs.
They talk about Eskimos having two hundred words for snow, that’s nothing.
In my conlang I am working on, Windish, there are precisely 78,125 words for farts.
The words for farts are all seven letters long. The first letter refers to the duration in seconds. If it is less than half a second, it is B, up to one second is D, one to two seconds is F, two to four seconds is G and K is for anything over four seconds.
Noise level is the second letter. A is noiseless. E is if it would have been heard in a silent room by people listening for it. I is small noise. O is quite loud, and U is a cathedral organ.
Third letter refers to smell level. H is smell free, L, N, and R increase on that while S is a tram-clearer.
The fourth refers to moisture level, with J for a dry fart, M P and T with medium moisture. T already produces skidmarks while Z needs an immediate change of underwear and probably outer wear too.
The fifth is volume of gas overall, again on a sliding scale going through the vowels A E I O and U.
In sixth you have degree of control with X being performed on purpose, R is one that was held in for a while and then released at will, N is normal level P is lower than average preparation time and L is totally unexpected. Usually a corollary of standing up or changing one’s sitting position.
Which brings us nicely on to the seventh letter. Bodily position – we take as official the position at the start of the fart. T is a seated fart, standing still is F while K is while walking or running. Lying in a bath or while sleeping is M (although some ancient dialects of the conlang use N for the latter although this is frowned upon as it is considered vulgar) while farting during sex (in any position) is S.
So for example a Kuszuls is like everyone’s nightmare while a Bahjaxt is pretty harmless and happens to most of us several times a day.
Snow, huh!
Brexit – what next? (guest article by my friend Martin Williams of European Business Solutions)
The UK voted in the Referendum by a very narrow margin the leave the EU. But it is not as simple as that. The process of leaving begins when the UK writes formally to the EU, specifically commencing the process set out in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The Referendum is technically not binding on Parliament, the overwhelming majority of MPs preferring Britain to stay in the EU. The Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, has said he will step down for a new leader of the Conservative Party to be appointed, sometime in the Autumn, and he will not invoke Article 50, believing that this should be done by the new Prime Minister.
The leader of the “Out” side, Mr Johnson has said that he believes that the EU and the UK will retain access to each other’s markets. Mr Johnson adds that “Immigration was not the main issue in the Referendum” and a spokesman for Mrs Merkel has already commented that access to the EU Market for the UK is perfectly possible if the UK pays a contribution to the costs of the market in a similar way to Norway. Incidentally, this model also involves, for all practical purposes, free movement of people. Then what is going to change I hear you ask, and my opinion is “Not very much” The UK and the EU will continue to be effectively a free trade area, there will be movement of people and the UK will contribute to the costs. Read the rest of this entry
A good time to germinate your German
Today’s article is in response to a request I had on Facebook Messenger from a Polish youth called Adam.
He complains of having received 10 years of teaching at school in German after which he has emerged with very little German knowledge, and blames this on the teaching. He has however managed to learn English even though he didn’t get this kind of classroom time in English. He feels if anything that the lessons at school just served to make him feel bad about German as a language.
Vergissmeinnicht – naja, das ist genau worauf wir hinauf sind…
This is not to do with any implicit dislike of German people or the country – indeed in 8 months time he means to move there on his own and wants now to learn sufficient German in the intervening 8 months to cope with the move and function properly in the country.
So I agreed to produce an 8 month plan of action for someone in this situation, but it will just be a first 8 months of an ongoing study plan, but in English and here for other people to benefit from who are in the same situation. Read the rest of this entry
Qui habet aures audiendi audiat, Audible!
It’s time for me to say publicly how unhappy I am about this policy of not allowing me to participate in some of the daily deals because I live in a different EU country to the UK. I am from the UK, I travel and work all over Europe and live in Poland, but in Europe we have a special law (ironically in this context) called the Treaty of Rome which grants us four freedoms, including freedom of the movement of people and of services and of goods.
Nothing can override these freedoms as they are lex specialis. The problem is of course, that the EU in its current form is full of good thoughts and ideas which are applied on a selective basis. When they want our votes we are told we have these rights, but afterwards there are 1001 ways in which they are limited, if only by resources but also by all the special interests which really pull the strings. How can it be that in the EU a publisher can release books in one country but not in another? I understand there can be good reasons to limit that. I understand for example “Mein Kampf” being illegal in Germany, but Mary Beard? What has she been saying that would stir shit up in Poland? Read the rest of this entry
To Polish people and others who use the term “Ms Amy”, “Mr David”, etc in English
Just for your information, a title plus the first name is decidedly old-fashioned in English now. We use it for people with very high titles, such as Sir Cliff (Richards), Dame Edna (Everage) but not Lord and Lady. Mr, Miss and Mrs were used only with surname already before Ms was revived in the 20th Century. Ms plus first name is recorded in the seventeeth century. Ms then went out of use for two centuries, (because it is actually short for “mistress” which took on a risqué meaning).
The use of any title less than Sir or Dame plus first name seems decidedly quaint now. One is put in mind of that traditional old Texas oil baron Jock Ewing, who persisted in calling his wife “Miss Ellie” even after they were married and even just before his funeral. I understand that this is a bit of a Texas thing.
Meeting his Dick(Whittington)ness Mr Boris Johnson, at least, a plasticine avatar of the same.
In the English-speaking world, first names seem to be in general use now and in the main people do not even ask for permission to switch to it. However there are still situations where deference is called for, such as to a client or a teacher, in which case Mr/Miss/Mrs/Ms or a professional/academic title like Dr or Professor are used with the surname. More highly honorific titles still, such as Excellency for embassadors, highness or majesty for royalty are not usually combined with names at all in direct address. It is also usually appropriate to use the term once in a meeting and then default to “sir, ma’am” after this. The use of first or second name after foreign titles used in English will follow the usage in the language of origin. Examples include Don Giovanni, Sheikh Yamani, Mufti Menk and Imam Bayildi.
I came, I sawm, I conquered…
No, that isn’t a typo in the title. Yes, it is another one of my trademark painful interlingual puns.
Fasting – known as “sawm” – during Ramadan is one of the so-called five pillars of Islam, or obligations described in Islamic texts, which many Muslims follow, alongside actions such as prayer, giving alms and making the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
Thus spake today’s article on the topic in the Daily Telegraph. They seem to have missed one of the five pillars, as I can only count four there, but such errors have never been known to bother the modern journalist. For the sake of completeness I will provide the whole list of these so-called “pillars”: shahadah (or “testifying” which means stating their belief that Allah is the name of the only God and his messenger is Mohammed as if it were fact) prayer, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage to Mecca. Read the rest of this entry
