Huliganov’s New Rants – #1 Book or Film

Original YT playout date: 25 March 2010
Duration: 28:05

By popular demand, Longlat and Merlin to be precise, the Huliganov Rants are back. I’m leaving too controversial topics alone this time, but the question of whether to watch a film before or after reading the book, if so be there be one, is a popular evergreen for ranting.

Thanks go also to Fat Steve of http://www.thebigcigarette.com (unfortunately Steve died some years ago and this site has been taken over by some weird Japanese stuff) fame for bringing to my notice the Italian version of “”Is Vic There?”” by Department S. Please go ahead and buy this from the Department Store so that I can be perceived as part of the music industry’s value chain and then maybe they’ll leave my creativity in peace.
Continue reading “Huliganov’s New Rants – #1 Book or Film”

Advanced Learners’ Literature Drill (“Advanced Drill”) with the GoldList Method.

I have mentioned this technique for advanced learners in earlier articles on Huliganov.TV, but today I wanted to make one article explaining who the Literature Drill is for and how exactly to do it, and incorporate it into a full learning programme stretching from complete beginner to near native.

Who should do the Advanced Drill?

In a sense this is about the most advanced drill that can be done, it is already intended for people who have completed all the grammar that is currently used and who know the top 5,000 frequency words – they have probably studied already exhaustively such excellent learners’ material as the “Using French” series from Cambridge University press, the Mot-a-Mot series or some similar, the Essential Grammars and the Frequency Dictionary series that are produced by Routledge. These in turn sit on top of having studied through a goof introductory course or two like the ones provided by Teach Yourself, Colloquial series and Living Language – some swear by Assimil and also there is a very good resource made by my friend Mike Campbell called the Glossika series. Each of these resources can be placed into your Goldlist. Prior to Goldlisting I tend to recommend front-loading audio only (though that’s not necessary with the Glossika method as there is audio for all of it and audio is part of the method intrinsic to Glossika) and so for most learners I would recommend going through whatever is available on Pimsleur before they even start the Goldlist phase and prior to Pimsleur for the few languages in which they are available, I recommend taking the very first steps using Michel Thomas method or Paul Noble for the three languages he does. Since all of these audio-only courses are not about writing this is all pre-goldlist stuff but helps to have an “inner voice” and a knowledge of how to pronounce the language which would be missing if we went straight into goldlisting a language form grammar books which we didn’t know how to pronounce. For classical languages that’s all there really is, I suppose – you can’t do audio only before Goldlisting Wright’s Gothic Grammar.

So I basically just went backwards along a list of things which a learner would be advise to do. If you don’t recognise the steps I just mentioned and can’t say that you know the sort of examples I gave for French in whichever language you are studying then probably the Advanced Learners’ Literature Drill I am going to talk about in a moment isn’t for you. Not yet, anyway. You’ll get there. Carry on doing the kind of steps for now that I’ve outlined in reverse order above.

However, if you are someone who has basically run out of learning material and you don’t know what to do next short of goldlisting a 20,000 word dictionary (which has its merits, too, quite a few people have done it to good effect but is a task not to be undertaken lightly). After all, most learning material is for beginners, there is some for intermediate learners and some for what they call advanced learners (usually the choice gets smaller the further you get) but for anything beyond the most popular languages you are going to encounter a dearth of learning material at the right level and instead you are going to have to “go live” with your languages, reading the same classics of the language which the natives did in school which will strengthen your cultural link with them and greatly enhance and deepen your feel of the language.The easy way in to using literature is graded readers. Continue reading “Advanced Learners’ Literature Drill (“Advanced Drill”) with the GoldList Method.”

Announcing the Huliganov TV Summer contributors’ competition!

volume
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.

Reunchaining the melody

   
 

 
 

Playout date:    11 September 2006
Location:    Home, Ochota
Other people featured: None
Music used:    Karaoke track of Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers
Languages used:    English
Animals featured:    None

 

This is probably the most disliked-to-liked video in my whole history of fillummakering, and it is not hard to see why. The rendition is dire. There’s no other word for it. But this stays in as proof of my dogged determination not to flinch at criticism, but to let it happen!

This melody became famous because of the film “Ghost” but this version is much more eery and spooky than the one that Demi Moore is listening to when she makes her pot!

A Mediterranean Morning of Misunderstanding (short story in the style of P.G.Wodehouse)

This was another of my entries to the Daily Telegraph Short Story Competition that made it to the Top Six, but didn’t win – I never did. It seems to have been removed maybe on suspicions that P.G. Wodehouse‘s estate might have something to say about me borrowing his characters and putting them to work again 80 years later. But I expect that it will be safe in a readership as small as this blog now is to share it with you, and I’ve been saving it up a bit. As ever there was a limit to the number of words and certain words like Diplodocus and Ginger Beer Plant had to be used in it – there were about five of these words that had to feature somewhere, I can’t remember them all now and My.Telegraph has been through too much of a transformation for me to be able to access that one now. Here goes, enjoy…

I awoke from dreams of performing “Burlington Bertie from Bow” to a packed music hall populated entirely by an audience of Bow Street magistrates of the Sir Watkyn Bassett ilk and kidney – you know, the sort that would fain and gladly hand yours truly down a short sharp sentence of fourteen days inside of one of Her Majesty’s decreed stately pleasure domes, as the fellow said, without the option, to the voice of what at first seemed to be a distant harpy eagle shrieking after its hapless prey, “Bertie! Bertie! Wake up, you cowperian sluggard! It’s already half past ten, you lazy, glassy-eyed nephew of mine, come and get your breakfast before it all goes cold!” Continue reading “A Mediterranean Morning of Misunderstanding (short story in the style of P.G.Wodehouse)”