Do elephants need the Goldlist method?

The eye of an asian elephant at Elephant Natur...
The eye of one who doesn't forget in a hurry...

I’ve put down a goldlist for years and picked it back up and continued. The long term memory is the long term memory. Humans and elephants have it in spades. The difference is that we can turn ours off by switching on the short-term memory in the process of conscious cramming or deliberate rote learning. Elephants probably cannot do that – an elephant never forgets. Their sample rate is higher as their brain is 7% Hippocampus and not just 5% like ours. They have a language which we have a lot of difficulty in understanding as it is in infrasound, travels 10 km and they use they feet and trunks as well as their huge ears to pick up the auditory signals. We need machines to hear any of this, and then we don’t really experience it but see it as vibrations on a screen. They on the other hand can eavesdrop on human speech and they take a particular interest when their keepers describe what plans they have to do with them.

If elephants were formal linguists and polyglots then they probably wouldn’t need something like an SRS or a goldlist method, as they are very natural in their use of their facilities. But since we humans do very silly things with our minds in aid of learning, under the influence of schoolteachers utterly uneducated in how the brain actually works and using a “one size fits all” method for learning, we do need something that can get our minds working more optimally again while approaching the learning of other languages. And that’s what this method and some other methods try to offer.

That spreadsheet, again…

In the second film by Huliganov on the Goldlist method a spreadsheet is used just to illustrate what the handwritten notebook should look like. It’s not to be used to encourage people to do their goldlists in Excel, as a handwritten goldlist will be much better.

The link given in that film died, thanks to my old provider, who removed his internet hosting service very clumsily onto Godaddy, and who then ignored my requests to enable me to access my control panel after he changed its location, and then came at me with unbelievable umbrage when I reacted to that by stopping his payments for the hosting.

I’ve now managed to dig up the original file, and many people have asked for it, so here it is.

http://groups.google.com/group/huliganov/web/goldlist.xls

It wasn’t possible to offer an .xls file for direct download on wordpress, but it’s on the Huliganov and Friends google group. It may ask you to join, in which case if there are any problems let me or kenbank from YT know as he is kind enough to co-moderate over there with me.

Protected: The Pursuit of Understanding – 1st Version for Claude Cartaginese’s Polyglot Project

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The Goldlist Method – Response to Appraisal and Critique by Group of Hardcore Polyglots and Linguists

Here is an article on the goldlist method which I wrote very recently on the How to Learn any Language forum in a thread which was very useful on the whole for the system – some of the top linguists and polyglots you can find on the net are there in that discussion, and they are putting this methiod to the test. Now some of them have already had the most tremendous success learning languages with their own preferred methods and are naturally suspicious of new-fangled approaches like this here Goldlist Method – some of them had criticisms to make, which are addressed below, but among them are plenty of hardcore linguists and polyglots who seem to really like the method. They are the hardest group to please, and you’ll see that despite the dissenting voices there are many who stand up for the method and more people do seem to approve of it than disapprove. And I don’t think I’ll ever have a tougher audience for this. Continue reading “The Goldlist Method – Response to Appraisal and Critique by Group of Hardcore Polyglots and Linguists” →

Metodologia Gold List #2 – Jak to dziala w praktyce.

W pierwszej czesci wyjasnienia metdy gold list po-polsku mielismy niestety tylko pierwsze 40 minut lekcji ktora trwala 2 godziny, bo odcielo sie po tym czasie (moj syn ciagle tam majstrowal podczas filmowania) ale dla moich widzow polskojezycznych, ktorzy licznie prosili cos o metodologii po polsku po moim wystepie w TVNie, to juz jest cos. Dzieki pani Katarzynie, ktora zna Kubusia z pierwszego filmu, mialem kolejna okazje filmowac dalszy ciag wyjasnienia.