I understand that the download from DocsStocs made by Claude Cartaginese has now reached into over 5,000 downloads, with also many other sources of this document appearing also on the web as people share it freely as intended, so that the full number of downloads may be as high as 10,000 or more.
The Polyglot Project - 42 contributors, 534 pages, including the whole background to the Goldlist Methodology and how I came to invent it.
Set against that, though is the fact that not nearly so many paper copies have been ordered. The only place they can be ordered is Amazon in America, not the UK Amazon as yet, and the link to the product is embedded on the thumbnail.
If you would like a book worth in fact over 50 USD if it had not be gifted by over 40 volunteers each telling how they managed to learn multiple languages for less than 17 dollars, and also support Uncle Claude who had to fork out some of his private lolly on making the first bunch of paper books that are not selling, even though people have been eager to take the free version, then either click on the link here (which gives you the same price and I think I’m on 6% without costing you any more) or if you don’t want to give me 6% but still pay the same, then find the link just by going normally to Amazon.com and searching for it.
If you read the e-version and liked it, why not buy the paper version as a gift for someone else? It will always be possible to get a free version of this booki, but the printed one is very nice too and a good use of seventeen dollars, so please let’s be having a few more purchases of it.
So if you follow that link you should see the whole thread, but just for some context here I’ll include the post just before mine, by Harry, which I basically agree with:
Nola I am with you. I have looked at books that have no Cyrillic and
they are a joke. Even for the absolute beginner, and we all were
there at one time and confused. I think these books are attractive to
some because let’s face it the Cyrillic alphabet is intimidating to a
beginner. If you are serious about learning this beautiful language
don’t waste your money on books like this. Since the language is
purely phonetic it is essential to understand the alphabet before
going very far. This helps a great deal when you hear words and can
recognize verb conjugation or the case of the word which Nola has
pointed out. Unless you recognize these two things you may recognize
the words the other person is saying but you will not have a clue as
what they are trying to communicate. Learning phrases is useless if
you can not understand the person’s response.
I have reviewed a lot of learning programs and of course everybody has
their own preferences. Personally, I am impressed with the Michel
Thomas method. The format is an instructor with a male and female
student as she teaches them. The advantage of this method is that you
get a lot of grammar explanations on the spot for both male and female
verbiage. Hope I it is OK to plug the course here. I would be
interested in Doctor Victor’s input. I love his course and
methodology but the lessons are incomplete. After you are comfortable
with Rl101 and Rl102 you will be hungry for more.
Harry
OK, so here’s my reponse to the thread, not just what Harry said although I do refer to it in one or two points:
There is no point in books on Russian which are simply written in
transcribed Latin letters. I understand why books about Japanese need
to be written first off with romaji, I understand why western learners
of Mandarin need to lean on pinyin for a while. I can see that with
three separate sets of consonants depending on which tone group the
word is in, learners of Thai need to use their own clumsy Latin
transcription system (or pick one of a number of conflicting ones)
I’ll even go so far as to say that because of the lack of vowels
(although you can add them, of course) Arabic and Hebrew learners need
to lean on their own alphabets for a while. The shorter the better.
"Mr Brezhnev, I've seen your name written in a number of different ways, could you tell me what the right one is?" "Sure, comrade. Ze right vay iss ze Russian vay, simply as zat!"
Now you probably DO need to know how to transcribe Russian into
“western” if you intend to go far with it, but then what you need to
know is that each language has its own system for transcribing
Russian. So the person whose eyebrows are similar to mine, and who is
older than me so I can’t even say I thought of them first, is known as
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in the English speaking world, but you just
look at his wikipedia entries, you’ll find the following:
German: Leonid Iljitsch Breschnew
French: Léonid Ilitch Brejnev (you’ll also see them writing the ending
in “eff” in older texts)
Czech: Leonid Iljič Brežněv
Spanish: Leonid Ilich Brézhnev
Polish: Leonid Iljicz Breżniew
Italian: Leonid Il’ič Brežnev (which is bizarre, as those signs aren’t
even part of the Italian language)
Danish: Leonid Iljitj Bresjnev
So while there’s general agreement about the “Leonid” with only the
French dissenting, and that only because of the demands of their
farmers, we have in a sample of eight languages including English,
eight different ways of spelling his patronymic and eight different
ways of spelling his family name!
And they are all quite correct, for the language they are used in.
If there were a single international system for the transliteration of
Russian, a kind of Russian pinyin (there is actually, but only really
used by librarians and people quoting scientific papers) that they
would look after, then there would be a bit more marginal value in
using it to learn, but even in that case it would be stupid, given
that actual cyrillics can be learned so quickly. Thousands have
learned cyrillics off my 101 series. If it’s taking more that two or
three weeks then the person either isn’t getting the method right or
they are not very adept, and either way that gate will prevent those
people wasting their time getting into the meat of the language, which
they probably won’t be able to get their heads round either, if they
baulked at the alphabet, so it’s a mercy for them.
So I just demonstrated that with a book on Russian in English letters,
not only will you not communicate properly in Russia, but also you
won’t communicate properly with people who did the same thing as you
did but coming from other language groups, even neighbouring languages
to ours. So it really is a pointless exercise, other than to make
money for the author, of course, as it’s an easier book to typeset,
and will attract its share of buyers despite being hopeless,
especially if they are not honest enough to describe online or in the
paper catalogue the absence of proper cyrillics.
Thankfully with things like Amazon we have the opportunity to add our
own reviews, and I’d really encourage you to flag up any language
books which don’t teach proper literacy. Both in Russian and in any
other language – the new TY series have removed proper literacy from a
number of their books and this really deserves to be flagged.
That doesn’t mean that audio only courses like Pimsleur or the
superior Michel Thomas method by Natasha Bershadski (should be –
dskaya, of course, which is not a great start – I hope she doesn’t
teach the language that way getting the genders of adjectives all
wrong) which Harry talks about hoping I won’t mind (of course not!)
are not valuable. They might be a nice entry-level way to see if you
like the sound and the kind of structures that you have ahead before
you ever put pero to bumaga in Russian. What the course consists of
I’ll come to in a second
I got told off by my friend Harold Goodman (I hope he’s still my
friend!) who did Michel Thomas’ Mandarin Course for suggesting in a
forum ways in which these courses could be available for less than the
cover price, and given that the cover prices of all MT courses fell on
Amazon by 30% (looks like what I was saying and some others too
started filtering back to Hodder) and given that you have to
appreciate the work the authors and everyone else put into this, and
most overridingly given that there won’t be any more courses in the
new series of MT if they’re not making money, and I seriously want
Harold to make the Hebrew course, I shall not be giving that advice
out any more. If you know it, you know it – and if you don’t, you
don’t. If you want something free, what’s on Youtube is free.
A course like Michel Thomas method contains generally 8 CDs of about
an hour in length for the foundation course. The first two of these
will be a repetition of the two CDs in the introductory course, hence
the latter is not worth buying unless all you want is an answer to the
question whether the method works for you or not. I’ll give you the
answer to that, if it doesn’t work, nothing will, so just go ahead and
buy the foundation course, especially while it’s 30% off. After this
you get an “advanced” course (it’s not really “advanced”, off course,
expect in comparison with the foundation course) and that has 4 CDs
with the pace slightly upped so that you really score as much vocab
again off the advanced course as you did on the Foundation course. And
then after that you get for most languages a vocab course (for Greek
there isn’t a vocab MT course but the authress has craftily made her
own Chinnor-based vocab book and CD set and Amazon sells it of course
as a set with her two MT products) and in the case of MT Russian you
get 4 CDs. And you are getting drilled on the vocab as it emerges –
you are using it in sentences that also reinforce recently learned
vocab.
So if you take the three together you have 16 hours of recordings.
Used properly, ie with the pause button, you’re going to use 50 hours
of your time or more to go through the three level course. Equivalent
class room time would have cost a good deal more of course, but you
would have been able to ask questions. But I’m really no fan of the
language classroom, not as an efficient means of learning languages,
anyhow, however pleasant and collegial it may be.
And maybe we can say that Pareto’s rule has applied to MT’s method
course, that these 50 hours, spent efficiently, will give you 80% of
what 250 hours of conventional learning would have given. That may be
a bit overgenerous on my part, as I am still not convinced that a lot
of what goes on in the lessons isn’t going into the short term memory.
Only a staged presentation system that goes over two weeks can really
tell you that. But on the other hand if you don’t rush at a Michel
Thomas course like a bull in a china shop, but take it relaxed, and go
back after two weeks and check you can still do it – don’t try to
learn while you are doing it – then you may well find that the key
drivers of the goldlist method as regards short and long term memory
can also come into play in the MT method.
However, all of this still only gets you, regardless of the ambitious
names of the courses, at a level where you will be close to entry
point once you start actually writing in Russian. If you did the MT
course, you’ll feel a familiarity with the words when you come to
write them. While doing the MT course, an absolute beginner might do
my RL 101 which keeps the actual Russian content intentionally low for
the first half – those cyrillics equally well apply to almost all
languages written in cyrillics. And then that beginner should drill
the Russian alphabet as I say, by writing his own language in
cyrillics. Or they can learn (using Wikipedia, for example, or Google
translate) how place names and personal names are transcribed into
cyrillics by Russians. That will be a very good drill for cyrillics,
as well as be useful for the future for the learner to know, but won’t
conflict much with what the MT tutor Natasha is presenting the MT way.
It’s coming in from a wholly different direction.
Then when you finish all that MT has to offer and also feel really
comfortable with cyrillics as a writing system, then you go an get a
nice, traditional book and put the two together, or you can watch what
there is of my RL 102 course, an unfinished work as we all know, and
go to the course book from there.
Before I finish I will say that a learner’s book should have the
cyrillics with stresses on the stressed vowels and the two dots on the
‘yo’, but also make it clear to students that they shouldn’t get used
to them. I decided in the video course that as I was sitting there
giving the pronunciation for the words on screen anyway, that neither
of these crutches were necessary, and so it is in real Russian. Which
you may say is ironic.
Jeden z najlepszych narzędzi dla poliglotyzmu dziecka
W dniu dzisiejszym odchylam się od zwyczaju pisania w języku angielskim, ze względu na otrzymanie dwóch pytań od widzów względnie czytelnikow moich klipów i postów. Najpierw na facebooku otrzymałem ten zestaw pytań od Pani Agnieszka F.
Jakiś czas temu w sieci trafiłąm na wywiad z Panem w TVN.
Przesyłam wyrazy uznania i podziwu dla Pańskiego talentu i pracy.
Z dużym zainteresowaniem obejrzałam Pańskie filmy w języku polskim na youtube. Od stycznia z dużą determinacją próbuję według Pana metody uczyć się języka hiszpańskiego. Poza tym, że przepisuję słówka to czas spędzany w komunikacji miejskiej spędzam na słuchaniu audiokursu. Chciałbym Pana prosić o odpowiedź na kilka pytań: 1. Czy jest limit słów, jaki danego dnia mogę przepisać? Jeśli mam czas to danego dnia przepisuję nawet po 300 słów. 25 na stronie krótka przerwa i znów 25 na stronie itd. Czy jest tu jakieś ograniczenie. W wakacje planuję wyjazd do Hiszpanii i zależy mi na czasie.
Oprócz trzymaniu się reżymu regularnych przerw, tak jak Pani robi, jedynym innym limitem jest granica wytrzymałości Pani zainteresowania. Jeżeli zaczyna to być już nudnoscią lub utrapeniem, trzeba to już odstawić na inny czas. Ja też nie przerabiam więcej niż 300 słów/linii dziennie.
2. Wstyd się przyznać, ale jesli chodzi o język angielski mam bardzo słabą i to bierną znajomość, tzn. potrafię coś zrozumieć, ale mam blokadę jeśli chodzi o mówienie. Teraz jeśli będę dalej chciała kontynuować naukę tak jak sobie wszystko zaplanowałam do września powinnam mieć angielski komunikatywny, a przez następny rok akademicki opanować go tak, by móc pozwolić sobie na czytanie książek biznesowych. Czy Pana zdaniem jest to w ogóle możliwe?
Pewnie. Jak by stosować goldlist w takim tempo jak 300 słów dziennie, 5 dni w tygodniu, to w ciągu jednego roku ma się pod pasem 300/3*5*50 czyli 25,000 słów. Tylko 15,000 słów jest potrzebnie, aby z pełnym komfortem podejść do czytania np kurs ACCA.
3.Czy można się uczyć jednocześnie dwóch języków przy użyciu opracowanej przez Pana metody? Jesli tak to czy mogę jednego dnia uczyć się trochę angielskiego, trochę hiszpańskiego czy lepiej jednego dnia angielskeigo drugiego hiszpańskiego? A może jest to w ogóle niemożliwe? Będę Panu bardzo wdzięczna za ewentualne odpowiedzi, a tym samym ogromną pomoc. Jeśli prowadzi Pan jakieś statystyki mogę również poinformować o swoich postępach. Z wyrazami podziwu, Agnieszka F
Można, ale odradzę od robienia dwóch językow naraz tej samej rodziny. Na przykład angielski z niemieckim, duńskim bądz niderlandzkim. Uważam wręcz, że nawet pomaga bardzo kiedy się uczy drugiego języka obcego używając materiały przygotowane dla mówców pierwszego języka obcego. W ten sposób mogła by pani zakupić kurs zaawansowanej angielszczyzny z hiszpańskiej księgarni internetowej, na przykład.
Mam nadzieję ze to pomoże, no i naturalnie zawsze jestem ciekaw usłyszeć o wynikach i postępach ludzi, którzy stosowali moje metody i porady, więc bardzo proszę!
— Previous Private Message —
[B]Sent by :[/B] markam91
[B]Sent :[/B] 14 January 2011 at 11:12pm
Witam,
Czy mógłbym się dowiedzieć w jaki sposób nauczyłeś swoją córkę trzech języków? Jedyne, co przychodzi mi do głowy, to sposób mojego polonisty, który postanowił sobie, że żona będzie odzywała się do nowo narodzonego dziecka wyłącznie po polsku, a wspomniany polonista tylko po angielsku.
Pozdrawiam
Jeden rodzic mówi w swoim języku, drugi w swoim języku, a środowisko ma jeszcze trzeci język.
Na przykład, w naszej rodzinie ja z córką mowiłem głownie po angielsku, żona po rosyjsku, a środowisko (czyli szkola, telewizja, przyjaciolki na osiedlu) jest polskojęzyczne. Od tego, że ja mowię do żony głównie po rosyjsku, i tez pracuję, więc często nie ma mnie w domu, trzeba bylo uzupełnić angielskie wpływy poprzez kupienie DVD ulubionych filmów dziecięcych z Anglii bez języka polskiego, i wiecej książek po angielsku, plus wakacji u moich rodziców, którzy tylko mówia po angielsku.
As mentioned in the last post, I also received a couple of questions from another YouTube viewer this week, and this time it was channel name Kahnkanter.
Thank you for sharing your method. I would like more information on two things:
1. Activation. How does that happen? You have mentioned that it takes a maximum of 3 days, and uses the passive long term storage of vocabulary in that language. But how does one ‘activate’? By simply being surrounded by that language?!
When I talk about activation taking three days, I am referring to the case where someone learns a language in a country where it isn’t spoken, and has the problem that not everything they learn is on the tip of their tongue. I explain to people that actually that is not a problem. As long as they know something passively (ie, they immediately remember and know the meaning of the foreign word when it is presented to them, would notice if it were misspelled or mispronounced or used in a wrong context, etc) then the fact that they are having trouble at five minutes notice to be able to put themselves into the language they learn well enough to have their whole vocabulary at the tip of their tongue is normal, is part of the economy of the mind and is there to actually enable us to learn and know more without having a consiousness overload.
People talk about the back of one’s mind and the front of one’s mind, but those are old ways of talking about it and don’t necessarily equate at all to where the physical synapses are. I never worried too much about left brain, right brain frontal lobes, medulla oblongata or all of that as I never had, and still don’t have, any plans to perform brain surgery on anyone. So when I talk about these things I am talking about them in a push-button-user’s way. Don’t even ask me what the physical mechanisms are.
I know it takes three days because I have travelled a lot and spoken to many other linguists who say the same thing. It just means being in an environment where you can sense that you need all that knowledge and it all comes to the fore pretty quickly. Three days probably evolved as you can get by in extremis even without water for three days, but after that things start to get rather nasty. You need all your linguistic mental resources to be completely focussed on a given situation within three days, but you don’t always need them immediately.
Now I think I understand right that you are living in Korea but you are not Korean. You want to learn Korean and you are either in Korea now or about to go there. In this case you will not experience becoming activated until you leave Korea for more than three days and become unused to learning the language. Especially if you have to think into using a different language that also is foreign to you in that period. When that happens, wait till you go back and see how at first you have to think for a bit before finding some words, but you don’t have that any more after three days, even for words which didn’t come up in conversation or your reading in those first three days back.
In short, if you learn in the country, you won’t experience the strange but fascinating “miracle” of three day activation that people learning at their desks away from the country can get. You’ll be activising as you go because you live there. You’ll just get a mini version of that if you leave and don’t speak Korean for some weeks before going back.
2. I am hoping to do this for the Korean language. It has its own script and so I wanted to know whether I put a word in its own characters (most of which I can read) plus its romanization on the one line, then continue for another 24?
Thanks!
I think that as far as using the Hangeul / Hangul is concerned, it’s not an unduly difficult thing and so I recommend starting to rely on it and not romanise as soon as you can manage it. I would not necessary be saying the same if you wanted to learn Korean kanji, but since not every Korean even knows Korean kanji (it drifts on and off the syllabus in the education system there, sometimes it skips generations, like an embarrassing mental illness)
In the time before using the Goldlist I would have just played about with Hangeul by writing out all the ways they transliterate Western personal names and place names, then go on to recognising, (if you want to be ultra rational, in population order) all the names of cities as they look in hangul. This would be like a pre-Goldlist just getting used to the script, and enjoying its uniqueness, cleverness and exotic feel.
Then for the Goldlist proper I would put everything from the first thousand words in Hangeul and romanisation in the head list, but only use the hangul in the D1 distillation unless there are any you didn’t remember in which case you could keep those Romanisations on the line by way of exception. That’s what I would do.
Akon’s Mr Lonely karaoke track, used to rap Onegin’s letter from the end of Evgeniy Onegin
Languages used:
English, Russian
Animals featured:
None
This fourth lesson deals with 5 letters that are not in English at all but come from Greek. Here we have a difference to the previous lesson which had letters that look like English letters, but because of Greek they have a different use in Cyrillics.
With 160 likes against 2 dislikes, this has to be one of the most popular videos I ever did.
