90,000 reps with Glossika

General discussion about learning languages
Valddu
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Languages: Spanish (C1)
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90,000 reps with Glossika

Postby Valddu » Sat Jul 10, 2021 9:57 pm

Glossika has changed numerous times in the last few years and I thought a review could show the strengths and limitations of the program in its most current form. If you’re not sure what Glossika is, it’s a pretty simple web app for language learning. You hear a sentence in your native language. Then you hear the translation in your target language. You shadow that sentence (called a “rep”). You continuously do those with several thousand sentences to help gain fluency in your target language.

Here’s my stats with the program:
I did 90k reps over the course of 177 hours with Mexican Spanish during my 4th year of studying the language. Most of my reps were done in listening mode only using only target language audio and the shortest intervals possible. I never used the old version of Glossika when it was MP3s or Cds or whatever, but instead I did most of my reps with the 4.0 system which brought in a lot of changes: Instead of learning new sentences and then “mastering” them in 5 days before they disappeared forever, an algorithm brings back old sentences SRS-style. They also brought in some other really useful features: like being able to just review sentences that you favorited, getting rid of sentences that are too easy, and being able to set daily goals. There are also typing and dictation exercises, but I did not invest any time into those features (someone might find more success with Glossika using them).


Here’s What I Liked About the Program: 

--Glossika generally gives you an huge number of variations of how to express the same idea. For example, I have never need to call someone in Spanish and set-up an appointment, but I feel very confident that I could do so now because I’ve heard an absurd number of sentences and variations of sentences built around phone calls and setting dates/appointments. And with Glossika often times an idea like “How about Friday at 11?” isn’t just expressed in just that one way. You get “What do you think about Friday at 11? Does Friday at 11 sound good? Would you be okay with Friday at 11? Would you be free at 11 on Friday? Are you available at 11 on Friday?” All those variations don’t come at you in one go--they trickle in as you work through the sentence bank.

--It’ll train you to handle certain situations very well. If you used Glossika seriously a few months before a trip to another country I think you could easily go to a restaurant, airport, or give directions and be able to understand/be understood and not get flustered by much. There’s just so many sentences built around those situations that you could turn off the sentences not related to those topics and have this weird form of fluency where you’d be B1+ in anything related to shopping and ordering food and travel but completely lost if someone asks you about your weekend. And if there’s a situation that you can’t really see yourself being in (like the doctor’s office, for example) you can change the settings to that Glossika doesn’t show you sentences from that domain.

--There’s almost 6000 sentences. The A1 level had around 2500 sentences in it alone.

--You can do it hands-off. I mostly listened to my reps while going for walks and getting exercise, but I’ve used it in the car as well.

--It provides a lot of comprehensible input. If you keep it in your target level with the shortest intervals you can very efficiently exposure yourself to a large quantity of sentences in a relatively short amount of time. I could often do 500 reps within an hour, and anytime I wasn’t sure what a sentence was saying I could glance at my phone and “cheat” and see the English translation.

--The spanish doesn’t try to be neutral. You can choose between Spain Spanish or Mexican Spanish. The Mexican Spanish is great--it occasionally uses a bit of slang and Mexican idioms without overdoing it.

--Great for your pronunciation. Glossika always hires native speakers to deliver all the sentences, and by shadowing the sentences over and over you end up mimicking their pronunciation and intonation.



Here’s What I Don’t Like:
--Strangely, the two male speakers that speak all the Mexican Spanish sentences are occasionally required to say sentences that doesn’t match their gender. This was rare, but always threw me off. Glossika definitely needs to hire female speakers to do those or get rid of those sentences altogether.

--The favorite/too easy button are too close together on the web app. If you’re only listening to a sentence once and you decide to favorite it you have 1-2 seconds to press the right button. You can easily press the wrong one and send it to the too easy limbo never to be seen again. Glossika has a lot of great and useful sentences, but it has a lot of stuff that was too easy for me or too domain specific. Making these buttons easier to access would really improve the user experience.

--- I mostly listened to the sentences, but I occasionally checked the written English/Spanish version of the sentences and found small errors and discrepancies. Nothing major, but I definitely think it would drive me nuts if I ever used the dictation/typing mode and kept bumping into sentences where the audio didn’t match the written sentence.

---Using the favorited sentences review was hit and miss. A lot of times it would reset my progress from one day to the next as I worked through my 1200 favorited sentences. Also, sometimes the servers are down and you can’t do your reps for the day.

--It's very grindy. I hit 90k reps with Glossika, but why not just wait till 100k reps to write a review? Well the problem is that doing Glossika can be really boring, and I was obly able to do my reps by going for walks. Once I hit 90k sentences there was a spat of bad weather that ruined my walking habit, and after that, I don’t know. I just couldn’t bring myself to go back to doing my reps. I had burnt out on the program.

--How they rank difficulty of sentences is weird.


First, look at these two groups of sentences from their bank. 

Group A:
Cuando pones dinero de lado, será para que trabaje por ti mañana y te dé beneficios.
Siempre me está pidiendo que haga cosas por ella, como si no tuviera ya suficiente que hacer.
Me hubiera encantado haber ido a la fiesta, pero fue imposible.
Como no había sillas para que nos sentáramos, nos tuvimos que sentar en el piso.

Group B:
¿En serio?
¿Es serio?
Increible!
¿Dónde esta?
Severo está enfermo.

If you had to assign a A1-C1 score to each batch of sentence what would you give them? (If it even makes sense to apple those labels here).

Well, the group of sentences comes from Glossika’s A1 sentences. The second group comes from A2.

Another example:
Tengo náusea
¿Tuvo la materia del universo un efecto enfriaste del universo primigenio?

How would you score them?

Well, Glossika says they’re both B1 sentences.

When I first using Glossika I did my best on the placement test because I thought of myself as B2--so anything less than that felt like a regression. Later I decided to fail the exam on purpose and start from the beginning so I could see the whole sentence bank. But the sentence bank’s labeling system seems completely arbitrary. Sure, the C1 sentences tend to be really long and full of scientific jargon, but outside of that literally any sentence seems to be just randomly labeled from A1-B2. Anyone using their placement exam is likely to cut themselves off from a huge chunk of the available sentences (literally A1 alone had about 2500 sentences of the nearly 6k sentences available for Spanish). Many of these A1 sentences featured the past and present subjunctive, future and conditional tense, useful connectors, idioms, commands, and a bit of slang. Unfortunately, I’m sure lots of people are missing out on a lot of useful sentences because of the placement exam.



Is it worth your time? Does it work?

Short answer: I think there are better uses of your time and money, but someone looking just to work on their pronunciation or use it to help with travel would probably benefit from using the service.


Long Answer: 

I definitely think I benefitted a lot from my time with Glossika, and if I were planning on going to a trip to another country and just wanted to get some survival phrases down I would probably come back to it for a short time, but there’s a limit to what learning sentences in isolation can do for you. In Spanish, you can speak to people informally with tu, or formally with usted, and using Glossika you would have lots of times to practice sentences that make use of both of those forms, but without any context there’s no way to know when to use which form, or to even know that one form is considered formal. There’s a certain logic to how Glossika works since in real life, we often learn language by listening and repeating, but devoid of a meaningful context in which you hear/repeat those sentences I think there’s a limit to how well you can really internalize the grammar and vocabulary. I definitely know too that while my passive ability to understand the sentences did go up dramatically, I definitely do not feel that my output benefitted as much. Glossika claims that with 100k sentences repped you will hit “mastery,” but even with 90k sentences repped I felt nowhere near that.

Plus, there’s the opportunity cost. The 177 hours I put into Glossika I could have spent listening to podcasts or using Anki or just watching Netflix. I could easily incorporate a lot of shadowing as I did any of those three things, and in the case of podcasts/Netflix my exposure to the language in those forms would have provided me a lot more context for knowing what phrases/words/grammar were appropriate in certain situations. And while the sentences I repped using Glossika definitely qualify as comprehensible input, they’re not particularly compelling input. Maybe if someone just spent 15-20 minutes a day with the program they would be able to use it consistently for years without burning out, but at the 90k mark I found myself just done with the program, despite having paid for the year.

I’ve ended up making Anki my Glossika substitute. It’s not as hands-off, but using the Immerse with Migaku add-ons and Chrome extension I’ve been able to just watch shows on Netflix and create audio-only cards out of any line of dialogue I find interesting. Later when I do my reviews, I shadow the sentences. If I can’t understand the audio, I can flip the card and see the closed captioning, the English translation, and a screenshot where the audio took place. In this way I can work on my listening comprehension and speaking, but using a sentence bank that’s tailored to my interests, and using lines of dialogue where I have a sense of the context. It’s more work to do it this way, but I find myself getting a lot of the same benefits as using Glossika, while using content that I find much more engaging. I think I’ll get more of a pay-off as a result of the time I’m investing in this program.
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mentecuerpo
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Location: El Salvador, Centroamerica, but lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Languages: Spanish (N) English (B2) Italian (A2) German (A1)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 18#p155218
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Re: 90,000 reps with Glossika

Postby mentecuerpo » Mon Jul 12, 2021 4:29 pm

Valddu wrote:¿Tuvo la materia del universo un efecto enfriaste del universo primigenio?


Thank you for your review, I do Glossika, not every day.
My stats:
German Elementary
A1 High
(10.3%)
162:29
Hours
53093
Reps
1085
Sentences

I am native Spanish speaker from El Salvador, and I am having a hard time understanding the Glossika Spanish sentence that you quoted.

I had to translate it to English using DeepL to get the some approximation of the meaning: "Did the matter of the universe have a cooling effect from the early universe?"

In my opinion, I find the Glossika German voice boring, but it gets the job done.
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WilliamYiffBuckley
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Languages: English (N), Russian (high B1), German (low B1), Portuguese (rusty B1)
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Re: 90,000 reps with Glossika

Postby WilliamYiffBuckley » Wed Jul 14, 2021 1:59 pm

I read this thread and decided to start the free trial--it's a week long and gives you access to all the available languages, so I'm toying with Georgian, Sixian Hakka and Mongolian. I'll probably try a major language proper later on, probably German or Portuguese, since I speak both of them at a decently high level (~B2-C1).

Piggybacking off what Valddu said, my main impression is that Glossika is quite useful for picking up new vocabulary and getting it to stick, if your main problem is a lack of vocabulary--e.g. the Russian major whose knowledge of the grammar is solid, but whose vocabulary has decayed badly, or someone who needs an accessory to a grammar-heavy textbook. For something you don't know at all you have to play field linguist or have a dictionary/grammar handy to decipher the nuances--e.g. Georgian რა დროა/ra droa 'what time is it?' comes with no explanation; there are a couple of other interrogative sentences in the first unit whose initial word starts with r-, e.g. როგორ ხარ?/rogor xar? 'how are you?' and რა ხდება?/ra xdeba? 'what's wrong?', so the linguistically aware learner might guess correctly that ra means 'what' or similar, that Georgian interrogative words tend to start with r- the same way Finnish interrogative words generally start with m- and Indo-European interrogatives tend to start with the appropriate reflex of *kʷ-, and that Georgian has wh-movement--like most European languages, but unlike Persian or Mandarin. And I'd dabbled enough in Georgian before to know what else I should be looking for--e.g. dro is 'time' per Wiktionary and -a is the copulative suffix, so ra dro-a can be parsed as 'what time-is'?

Then there's the misgraded sentences--e.g. is როდის იწყება კინო?/rodis its'q'eba k'ino? 'what time does the movie begin?' really appropriate for the second A1 unit? I recognize k'ino from Russian, and given our earlier adventures with words beginning in r- it's pretty clear that rodis means 'when', at least in this context. But this is Georgian, not Thai or even Spanish--I cannot just look at its'q'eba and figure out what the root is or what morphemes might have been added to it. We can compare ის ამთავრებს/is amtavrebs 'it finishes' and see what looks like a shared morpheme -eb- (what is it doing?), but different final suffixes--the English translation of both sentences is in the simple present, so the distinction is a mystery. Possibly after several thousands of reps I'd figure it out for myself, but I'm not a Georgian toddler, so why not explain what's going on? You're already charging me twenty-five bucks a month, if I'm doing the annual subscription, and you're able to pay natives to write and record all the sentences; is it really that much to ask a professional to check the curriculum grammar sequencing and write explanations at least as clear as Duolingo's? I've been to Tbilisi; you can hire a Georgian teacher for ten bucks an hour.

(A quick addendum to the Georgian course: I assumed that ra xdeba 'what's wrong?' is to be parsed as 'what wrong-is', with the copulative -a attached to an adjective **xdeb. In fact, xdeba is a verb 'it happens', as per Wiktionary--there's that -eb- morpheme again. A note to the Glossika people: don't do this; Georgian's confusing enough.)

A couple of the Hakka sentences don't have transcriptions. There are tone marks, but it's not clear to me whether or not there's tone sandhi operating I can't figure out. I'd like to read a language diary from someone with no prior experience trying to get through the entire Wenzhounese course; Wenzhounese tone sandhi is so infamously bad that the dialect was used by the Chinese army in WWII in the same capacity that the US used Navajo.

"It finishes' is a first-unit sentence in both Mongolian and Georgian (was this checked with professional teachers of the languages in question?) Both languages have significant amounts of verbal morphology, though Georgian considerably more so; I can guess that дуулдаг means 'finishes', and my guess is that -даг is the TAM suffix (basic present?), but that's only because I know something about Mongolian.

All these complaints aside, I think I'll probably try one of the bigger languages and likely shell out for a monthly or yearly subscription to Glossika; the audio exposure, even if it's nowhere near ideal, sticks vocab in your head darn well, and for languages like Mongolian or Georgian your pickings are pretty slim anyways. I'm mostly disappointed with the gap between what it is and what it easily could be given the company's copious financial resources.
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einzelne
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Re: 90,000 reps with Glossika

Postby einzelne » Wed Jul 14, 2021 5:59 pm

It's a known fact that Glossika is based on the sentences from Murphy's English Grammar in Use. It explains its weaknesses.

It doesn't take into account the disparities in grammar among languages. The English sentence "I need to go" is grammatically very simple, A1 level, while its French equivalent ("il faut que j'aille") requires the knowledge of subjonctif which is usually introduced at a higher intermediate level. The vocabulary on the other hand is rather limited, since Glossika is based on the grammar book.

It's not clear who the target audience is. You need to have a thorough knowledge of grammar in order to use this course effectively, yet for an advanced learner the vocabulary and basic speech patterns would be familiar. You can drill certain useful sentences but, personally, I prefer to do it with small dialogues (Assimil or Grammaire in dialogues are good examples of such an approach).

I think Glossika could be a great product, were it adapted for specific languages while also taking into account the frequency dictionary. I would be happy to have 9k sentences in audio with the 9k most frequent words to build and review my vocabulary in my dead time.
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