The method
Learning that happens while you do nothing
The Goldlist method was devised by David J. James, a translator and accountant who first called it Lexical Inventory Distillation. It rests on one observation: when you meet new material once, unhurried and without pressure, long‑term memory quietly keeps a portion of it — often around a third — with no drilling at all.
So the work is not to force words in. It is to find out, two weeks later, which ones stayed.
You write twenty‑five words and their translations by hand, once, with attention. Then you close the book. After at least fourteen days — long enough that anything you can still produce is coming from long‑term memory rather than short — you go back through the list. Everything you got right is already learned and leaves the cycle. What escaped you moves down to a shorter list. That is a distillation, and you rest it and distil it again.
One cycle
Twenty-five words, distilled four times
Written by hand, once. Then locked.
14 days' rest
The words you answered correctly are gone — learned.
14 days' rest
What is left is the stubborn part of the list.
14 days' rest
Whatever still survives returns to the Inbox for a future list.
Twenty-five, seventeen, eleven, seven. The list only ever gets shorter, and you never study the same word twice in a fortnight.
The app
A notebook that keeps the calendar for you
Paper Goldlists work, but they ask you to remember which list is due and when. Digital Goldlist does that part: it holds the fourteen-day rest, tells you when a list has woken up, and otherwise stays quiet.
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Nothing to keep up
No daily streak, no penalty for a week away. One notification when a list finishes resting — and you can switch that off too.
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Written by hand
Retype fields block pasting and autocorrect on purpose. That first careful writing is what does the work.
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Capture anywhere
Meet a word in a book, a browser or a chat and share it straight into the Inbox. It waits there until you want it.
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A book per language pair
German from Slovak and German from English are separate books, each with its own lists and history.
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Marked on the device
Answers are checked by spelling distance, so one slipped key still counts. No AI ever grades you.
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Offline by default
Everything works with no connection and no account. Optional AI translation, with your own key, is the only thing that uses the network.
Credit where it is due
The Goldlist method is David J. James's, not ours. This app is simply a place to keep the lists. His own explanation is still the best and fullest account of how and why it works.