I’ve mentioned the Gold List (for learning vocabulary) before, but it doesn’t seem to have its own thread, so I thought I would start one.
The inventor of the Gold List (David James) posted about this video on his blog. It’s not his own video, but it seems to have his blessing, and is a useful 4 minute summary.
The audio is purely musical which I found a distraction, and turned it off, but you may like it.
This method is not for everyone, but if you like writing by hand, and do not necessarily want to be dependent on technology all the time, then this may be for you. You need a large, lined, hardback notebook, as thick as you can find, and as good quality as you can afford. (He uses Moleskin ones (I don’t…)). And you write in them carefully in your best handwriting. Colour coding is recommended (though probably not essential). You do not try to memorise. That would be missing the point. It may seem slow, but he reckons that in the long-term, it’s a time saver, over systems like ANKI, which have a lot of repetition in them.
Could it be adapted to a computer? Probably, but again, that would be missing the point. The writing by hand is part of the method. (“Trust the method”).
You will eventually need more than one book. The video explains. And Davey explains more at considerable length in some of his own videos.
“Uncle Davey” as he is sometimes known, is, how shall I say - eccentric, but in a lovable way.
He uses a few different pseudonyms on Youtube, while teaching languages and when he’s speaking in English on those videos, he speaks it in the accent of the language he’s teaching. That may sound slightly barmy, but there is method in his madness.
Here he is in his Russian persona (Huliganov), explaining the method in French:
(sadly the blog he refers to in the video description seems to have been deleted).
But here he is in English (in his own accent), lecturing to a group of Russian students:
His real(?) blog:
As you will see, he is a man of many parts.