This is a place where I have collected materials about my system for learning languages called the GoldList method. I have started work on a book, which should be a useful addition to this, and in the near future, following on from my appearance speaking about this on “Dzien Dobry TVN” on 1st November 2009, I shall do a Polish film about the Gold List method, to help the large number of people who contacted me about it following the show.
Original YT playout date: 1 March 2009
Duration: 4:20
We take a sneak peek at three goldlists in progress, just to show that this is a living system, in use to learn languages for a variety of learners.
Continue reading “Goldylists and the Three Learners”
Original YT playout date: 28 February 2009
Duration: 1:14:13
Cheryl from Manitoba in Canada gives 5 great questions about the Gold List method which will certainly help people who are using the method and still have uncertainties about its application.
Some of these ideas are of course superseded and the best thing that you can do is look at the GoldList Method section in the navigation at the top of this site, and soon anyway the Guidebook is coming out.
Continue reading “Cheryl from Manitoba asks about the GoldList Method”
Original YT playout date: 2 November 2008
Duration: 1:00:19
My subscriber blueclue57 kindly invited me to come along and visit him while in Moscow – he said he had a class on Business English. I was taken by surprise that he wanted me to be guest lecturer, but I managed to cobble a couple of notes together during an earlier part of his lesson while he was doing an exercise – actually I don’t use the notes till the second half as I can’t really abide speaking from notes, I always prefer to adlib – and what came out is probably the best lecture yet done by me on the Gold List System. Thankfully blueclue57 was kind enough to film it on my cam, and the Vado held out somehow. No idea how, but it did.
The message here will help enlarge on what I already stated in the two earlier discussions of the Gold List system. Clearly I couldn’t stay in character as Huliganov while addressing a roomful of Russians learning English, so I’ve taken this out of the Second Huliganov’s Russia series, which is coming up soon.
The goldlist system is free but should be attributed to me. I have started writing a book on this subject, although all that is really needed to know is freely available in these videos and on http://www.goldlist.eu
The system has been seen now by thousands of people and put to the test by many of them. I have received literally hundreds of mails stating that the system works for people and has saved them from wasting time and failing, or else improved their result in learning languages.
Enjoy.
Continue reading “Uncle Davey Lectures on the GoldList Method at Moscow BKC-IH”
Those of my readers who are also on Olly Richards mailing list – and there may well be a sizeable crossover due to common interests – will have noted that he has a guest on this week, one “memory scientist” Anthony Metivier telling people that according to his method it is possible to learn 1000 words in six weeks.
Now just for the record let me say that learning words in isolation isn’t optial, better to learn short phrases showing the word in use with its collocations and recalling a range of grammar, but you certainly can learn words if you want to.
I just wanted to compare the results of people using the GoldList Method and certainly my own experience using the GoldList Method with this run rate of 1000 words in six weeks.
I prefer to use the term lines, and how many new words equate to 100 new lines depends entirely on the material. If it’s a dictionary it can be 100% or near. Probably the average is around half of that, and in some cases even less. Certainly I take several lines for each new word in Japanese, while in Czech I have 24,000 lines of Headlist and I know that there are around 18,000 words in there. Imiagine that we wanted to focus on words, we’d prepare material in order that a line was a word. So for this thought experiment I will take the idea 1 line of GLM = 1 word per Mr Metivier’s Method. GLM is very flexible so it will work around that.
To learn 1000 lines in GLM means to entirely distil them away. This cannot actually be done in six weeks as you can do a maximum of two distillations in that time. So instead you have to apply the long-term run rate which is 3 line repetitions on average per line of Headlist, because a 1000 line Headlist will distil out at somthing like this:
H = 1000,
D1 = 680,
D2 = 460,
D3 = 310
Bronze total 2,450
D4 = 175,
D5 = 125,
D6 = 90
D7 = 60
Silver Total 450
D8 = 40
D9 = 25
D10 = 15
D11 = 10
Gold Total 100
Grand total 3,000
3000/1000 = 3
It will vary from maybe 2.6 to 3.4 but in the main it will be around 3.
So to learn 1000 lines to the long term memory you need to do 3,000 lines in those 3 weeks.
That will be the equivalent of learning 1000 words, but you won’t necessarily know which of them they are. It won’t be a question of guaranteeing that all the words in a list of 1000 are in long-term memory, instead it is a question of following a long-term run rate.
So, how 3000 lines in 6 weeks is 500 lines a week.
That’s the same as the 5,000 level target on the 70 day challenges.
So effectively what Metivier is doing and what we are doing is a very similar result.
In our case, it should be possible using an average of 1.5 hours per day.
What is more interesting is to see which method gives the best passive recall two years after the six weeks in question are over.