📚 Sources — what was read, and what was left
This method did not come out of a laboratory. It was worked out in a classroom, and while it was being worked out it leaned on a number of books. Publishing the list seems the honest thing to do. A bare list, though, would suggest that these books somehow verify the method — so what we took and what we left is written next to each part. One practical note: most of the ten have no English edition, so the titles below are romanised with a literal translation in quotation marks, and the origin of each is named.
Grouped roughly in this order: speed listening, hearing, memory, the brain.
What we actually took from these books is, in nearly every case, a direction. That an ear given fast sound repeatedly gets used to the speed. That repetition changes the connections doing the work. That aiming at perfection is what breaks a routine before the routine can do anything. Directions like those can be built into a training design. Individual figures could not be.
Several of these are popular books, and mixed into them are claims that the field does not support: sorting personality and talent by left brain against right brain, the suggestion that one kind of training makes an illness go away, the “several times better” figures. We do not quote those passages. Having read a book and having rested an argument on it are two different things.
Directions from the books above; evidence from primary papers and public data. How long a consonant cue lasts, and what phoneme training did with it, comes from the published study rather than from any of these — see [[fast-forword-004sec]]. The distance between one language and another comes from the US Foreign Service Institute difficulty rankings, and word frequency from the Oxford English Corpus. Where a figure cannot be traced to a source like those, it does not go in the article.
Source
The list is taken from Oh Seung-jong’s blog post “Ten books that help in understanding the theory behind Daechung English” (August 2021). Editions and publishers will be filled in here as they are confirmed. On the order this method puts things in, see [[listening-first-order]]. — Not carried over from the Korean edition: none of the books’ efficacy or multiple-improvement claims are quoted. Titles that could not be matched to an original edition are romanised and marked as such rather than guessed at. This is a record of what was read, not a list of verified theory.
※ This article summarizes and restructures the key points of the source above.