Real-life Glossika

[alexidsa]

In the beginning of this year I found a remote job and decided to use a possibility to live anywhere around the world to learn new languages. I started researching how to learn languages fast taking advantage of immersion. My greatest inspiration was a blogpost (unfortunately can't find it anymore) by a guy who went to Taiwan for 3 months to learn Mandarin. He was recording a lot of audios of locals and then transcribing them with his teachers. So eventually he had transcripts and audios that he could read and listen again and again. It looked very promising, so I took his approach and tried to adopt it on the way. I've made a lot of mistakes while learning French, so I will mostly share what I did with Spanish.

At first I try to find efficient ways to text with locals. Dating apps (Tinder, Grinder, etc.) are great for that. They have a boost feature: you pay around 5 dollars and much more people start texting you. It's the best linguistic investment in my life I start talking (in written form) with people using a lot of Google Translate. At the end of the day I build a list of the most important sentences and work on them with my teacher the next day (I find it very important to have an offline teacher/local at this stage). I don't build a huge list of sentences, I just put enough sentences for the next day. This way I can be sure things are extremely contextual and I still feel emotional about those sentences (it doesn't happen if you build a huge list of sentences for the whole week). While working with a teacher we use those sentences as a starting point. We look at how it can be said in different ways, play around the phrases, build dialogues, etc. and at the end of the class I ask him/her to record an audio, so I can work on the sentences on my own.

The guy, who inspired me, recorded audios of locals a lot but I find it to be suboptimal for the first month or two. It takes a lot of time to record and cut the audio and then transcribe it. It seems to be more efficient to get basic vocabulary and grammar the other way around: using text in the first place and then recording an audio version of it afterwards. Though sometimes I do record audios of the most common everyday situations. It's a lot fun when you go to a cafe, record what a waitress said to you (understanding nothing), then come back in a couple of days being able to understand her and even respond to her.

I'm still figuring things out here and there but this approach seems to be extremely efficient way to boost a language from zero to decent B1 within 4-6 weeks (it gets less efficient afterwards). If you'd like to look into it in a more detailed way, here's a document with my Spanish phrases (you can find a link to audio files inside): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QGd ... Wneu6CyAfg Would love to know what you think about it.

[Axon]

Here's the Chinese post you mentioned. Amazing stuff, I've read through it several times. https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/t ... dy-review/

I've done something kind of similar in the past, and I actually made it into a short Glossika-style course. Everyday Sichuanese, for your listening pleasure. I ended up recording more sentences in Mandarin but there turned out to be quite a lot of buzz on the mic so I never turned it into anything. Actually I did post a bunch on Rhinospike and got a couple of native recordings there.

I also record myself a lot when I go out and about in foreign countries. Crucially, I don't ever go over these recordings with anyone, I just listen to them on my own. This may be why you're seeing a lot of progress

I'm working on a set of 400 sentences that I'll end up paying native speakers to translate and record for me. The Glossika approach works really well for me, but these sentences include the things I say all the time. Where are you from, where are you going, how long are you staying... as a tourist who can speak the language, you answer these questions constantly.

Keep up the good work! I'll be interested to see how this works out for you a few more weeks and months down the road.

[alexidsa]

Here's the Chinese post you mentioned. Amazing stuff, I've read through it several times. https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/t ... dy-review/

Thanks a lot! Finally I can reread it again. It's the most impressing linguistic stuff I've ever encountered. Okay, definitely in Top 3 with Listening-Reading Method's author.

I also record myself a lot when I go out and about in foreign countries. Crucially, I don't ever go over these recordings with anyone, I just listen to them on my own. This may be why you're seeing a lot of progress

I find working with someone on the phrases crucial (hey, the guy did it for 8 hours a day...). What I realised later on the way, was how important it is to use offline classes: communication bandwidth is higher (especially in the beginning) and it's much less tiring (after 2 hours of online classes at A1 level I'm dying). The more I move forward, the more I notice small but important things that guy was right about.

The Glossika approach works really well for me, but these sentences include the things I say all the time. Where are you from, where are you going, how long are you staying... as a tourist who can speak the language, you answer these questions constantly.

This real-life, contextual version of Glossika seems to be very efficient. It's a mystery to me why sentences in Glossika don't follow this idea. I've heard most of the sentences were just copy-pasted from Murphy... may be that's why.