We’ve found that the same [as with any athletic endeavour] holds true with language: you need to do lots of reps. […] You’ll start to feel the effects of fluency coming on when you hit 30,000 reps. You’ll be confidently using the language at around 60,000 reps. And we recommend to keep pushing until you’ve done 90,000 reps.
To begin with, let me express my appreciation of the convenience of the Glossika program. It is wonderful to have 3,000 sentences with audio, transcription, pronunciation, and translation, and in different kinds of formats (i.e. A-files, B-files, and C-files). Following the forums, I have the impression that many language learners have had tremendous success with Glossika. So I don’t want to question the effectiveness of the Glossika method.
However, I would like your opinion if there is anything special about the sentences selected by Glossika or the format L1->L2, which lets you recall the sentences from memory. In other words: Are other methods of listening to and speaking many sentences equally effective? For example, the accomplished polyglot Joseph Colon (otherwise known as Deka Glossai) says in his recent book Polyglot Life: Learn Any Language Quickly and Efficiently:
How well you understand a language grows proportionately with how many sentences you have understood; while how well you speak a language correlates directly with how many sentences you have pronounced and spoken. Again, it is impossible to give one number for every individual, and it is nearly impossible to keep track of how many sentences you have consumed or spoken, but 100,000 sentences would be a reasonably goal for basic fluency and 1,000,000 sentences for advanced fluency. Native speakers have heard, read, and spoken many times this number.
Since Joseph Colon (Deka Glossai) recommends Assimil (which also contains between 2,000 to 3,000 sentences), the question arises if repeating the sentences in an Assimil book over and over would be equally beneficial as Glossika? Or is shadowing (as recommended by Professor Arguelles) even more effective because it can be done in less time? Both methods should lead to memorization in the (very) long run, which however does not seem to be the main goal of shadowing. Likewise, the Glossika Learning Guide says:
You’ll get better results spending your time on reps rather than on memorization.
But if memorization is not the goal of Glossika, what else is it that is special about the Glossika method? I for myself think that it must be memorization; otherwise the Glossika Spaced Repetition files would not make any sense. Furthermore, the format L1->L2 is also prone to let you memorize the sentences since it requires recalling the sentences from memory which is a much faster way to memorization than just repetition.
Other methods that come to mind in this regard are Pimsleur and especially FSI (i.e. the audio lingual method). Pimsleur basically leads to memorization of basic phrases that you have to shuffle around in different combinations; and FSI explicitly asks you to memorize the basic sentences which are then to be manipulated in very extensive audio lingual drills in order to automate the production of certain sentence patterns. There are many language learners who swear by Pimsleur and especially by FSI. So are these methods ultimately only effective because they let you listen to and pronounce many sentences? Or is there more to it?
In other words: Is the only thing that counts in fluency development the number of “reps” (i.e. sentences heard and spoken), so that fluency can be achieved by overlearning to speak a set of sentences? Or is there more to it like memorization and/or learning how to manipulate sentences (i.e. applying and not just assimilating grammar rules)?