A (suspended) investigation of an obsolete form of glossika

[sfuqua]

GLOSSIKA
ES 30000: 1400 / 30000 reps
FR 30000: 1400 / 30000 reps

7 days without missing a day.
Wow, is Proust hard!
I know, that's the reason I got a bunch of sentences to make my anki deck more challenging. I think they may be *too* challenging. I need to give it some time, however. Eventually the new vocabulary in the sentences should start to snowball, and they'll get easier. Heck, I'm only doing 10 new Proust sentences a day. García-Márquez sentences have been beating me up also.

At one point I spent a lot of time with random sentence cards from Garcia-Marquez. and they were one of the best things I ever did for my Spanish. Of course, GGM is famous for big vocabulary and flowery language, but I love him. Perhaps, forcing yourself to read something hard, makes normal stuff seem easy, even if it doesn't exactly teach you the vocabulary you need for the easier stuff...

Glossika, was very easy yesterday, but was very hard today. Maybe it had something to do with the full lunch (yum, Greek food!) and the long swim I had before I started today... I'm not worried; there are always good days and bad days. I did French first today (I'm alternating which language is first, day by day), so I finished up with Spanish. When I ran into my daughter immediately afterward, I had a tremendous urge to start talking to her in Spanish.

Glossika is stirring something up in the brain cells

[sfuqua]

GLOSSIKA
ES 30000: 1600 / 30000 reps
FR 30000: 1600 / 30000 reps

Another day slamming along through glossika. I did too much mumbling during glossika French today. It was kind of hard to decipher the French. There is little in glossika French that I can't read aloud, but it can be hard to hear all the words during a brisk glossika drill.
Spanish rolls along with little problem ; glossika seems to get the language to the "tip of my tongue", but there isn't anything very challenging.

The Garcia-Marquez cards in my Anki deck are pretty challenging. There is a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary. Likewise with my Proust cards. I may add in some cards from some easier authors.

[sfuqua]

GLOSSIKA
ES 30000: 2000 / 30000 reps
FR 30000: 2000 / 30000 reps

Another couple of days rolling through glossika French and Spanish.

My French continues to be worryingly laggy, but the instructions say that there is no reason to try for perfection. If I was only doing French, I would start doubling up the GSR files, but since I'm doing Spanish also, I'm going to keep up the original plan. I'm probably performing at about 90% on French, so I bet I am still within the parameters the designers of the course expected. The whole process does seem to be working. I find random sentences in French or Spanish echoing in my head. I wonder what would happen if I kept this up for the whole 300 days that all of the courses put together suggest...

I decided that my sentences in my deck were just too hard, so I replaced them with some sentences of the translations of _Leviathan Awakes_ in both French and Spanish. By luck I was able to get legal, paid for copies of each. They may be too easy, but it is easy to forget how difficult anki decks can become when the reviews pile up. I'm still doing the sentences from glossika interweaved with the sentence cards from the novels. I just like doing sentence cards, as long as they are hard enough to take a second glance to understand, and as long as they have enough hard vocabulary to make them interesting. I'm including the glossika sentence cards more to make sure that I know how to spell the French, and also to make sure that I remember cards that I'm done reviewing with glossika.

[sfuqua]

GLOSSIKA
ES 30000: 2600 / 30000 reps
FR 30000: 2600 / 30000 reps

All is well. I'm in Ireland.

Glossika goes well; although a day on planes and a day of computer problems delayed me from keeping exactly on track, but there doesn't seem to be any harm done.
French, for some reason has gotten easier, and Spanish has never been much of a problem.
Anki continues smoothly; I added back my García-Marquez and Proust cards into my deck, mixed with Expanse cards. I also have cards from Perez-Reverte and Emmanuelle Arsen. The Emmanuelle books are erotica, but they contain straightforward French; I have electronic copies, and I'm old enough to know better.
My approach to Anki cards from novels has been to add all the sentences from a given novel or send of novels to a deck and then delete the sentences I don't like. This saves time in producing a bunch of cards, but it means that I get sentences that are not very useful in the deck. I'd rather trim sentences as I review rather than spend time picking the "best" sentences.
Sentence weeding rather than sentence mining. I've scrambled all of the sentences together, although it can be fun to put all of the sentences in a book into a deck in order, and read the book in Anki. This amounts to very intensive reading.

Glossika has just released their Tagalog course, and it doesn't look half bad. I haven't been able to get a full course set up yet; I don't have all my software tools available, since I'm travelling, but just looking at the transcripts is encouraging. I'm probably a B2/C1 in Tagalog by most measures, but I have some fossilized patterns which make me, well, sound way too much like a foreigner. I would hope that a glossika course might stretch my Tagalog in good directions. The first part of the course has Tagalog that I find very, very easy. The last third of the course has language in it that I easily understand, but which I probably wouldn't ever use, so this may be very useful for me to practice.
I have some questions about some of the vocabulary in the last part of the course. Like many languages, Tagalog has many different words to express the same general idea. Often there is a Austronesian/Malayo-Polynesian word for an idea (original Tagalog) word, a word borrowed from Spanish, and a word borrowed from English. The standard rule everyone gets taught in school is to prefer Tagalog over Spanish, and to use Spanish over English, but this is the opposite of how people talk. I ran into a few cases where it looked to me as if they where a little scholarly in their word choice toward the end of the course, but my wife, a very strong second language speaker of Tagalog, says are OK.

[Brun Ugle]

I read that they chose to use native Tagalog words over loan words wherever possible because they figure you'd easily recognize and learn the loan word in real life as soon as you heard it anyway and this way you'd know both. Whereas if they'd used the loan word, you wouldn't immediately recognize the Tagalog word if you heard it and then you'd end up having to learn it later. It seems like a good system to me. I have no plans for learning Tagalog at the moment, but if I were to learn it, I think that's how I'd like the course to be designed.

I thought of you when I saw the email announcing the new course. I almost posted something about it here, but then I figured you'd probably gotten the email too and that it probably wasn't going to be very useful for you anyway since you'd been speaking Tagalog for so long. It's interesting to see that you think you can still get something out of the course in spite of that,

Are you using the Mexican Spanish course, or the European one? I was inspired by you to try one of the training schedules and I'm now in the middle of week 2 of the 6-week intensive schedule with Mexican Spanish. So that means I've done one run-through of the Fluency1 C files and am about halfway through the B files and the GSR files. I'm a little annoyed by the slightly bad translations and all the little errors, like where the recording doesn't match the transcript, but I still think it's helping my fluency a bit.

[sfuqua]

I'm going to do a run through Tagalog eventually, as soon as I can get my setup right. Using the Tagalog word is fine, but you won't sound like a hipster. Their logic is good; learning the word "mall" for shopping mall is pretty easy and if you use their word, which means "place where people shop" people will think your Tagalog is high-class.
I'm using the European Spanish version. I think that by starting out with Assimil made me appreciate the whole Spanish way of talking. I know there is a lot of linguistic variation in Spain. On the plane across the Atlantic I sat next to a delightful young couple with a baby from Madrid. They were pure seseo when they spoke to each other, yet their intonation and word choice seemed to be very standard newscaster Spanish, except for the seseo. The Mom did code switch into distinción when her baby was misbehaving and she was talking to him. Interesting.

I think that the Spanish in the glossika European Spanish course may be a little bit on the hypercorrect side. She pronounces things very carefully and she completely avoids yeismo. I'm just following her pronunciation. I wonder if she sounds the same when she is ordering a glass of wine after work...

[Whodathunkitz]

Please let me know how the Tagalog course is.

It's on my longer term hitlist, and will be a good indication of the quality of the Cebuano one (in "Post-Production" - how long I wonder?).

For the Spanish, I read elsewhere (on here?) that the Glossika Peninsular/Iberian Spanish was better quality than the Mexican one, but I have no direct experience.

Salamat po!

BTW, my Cebuano is bisdak / bukid / province (old fashioned, country) simply from learning from Memrise or older books. Lots of people don't understand many of the words I've painstakingly (and pointlessly, it seems) learnt, or have to think and have a bit of a discussion before confirming that it is a real word "but nobody uses it, except in bukid/province. Bisdak kaayo!".

I think the cash machines (ATMs) do actually say Taglish as an option rather than Tagalog or Filipino. A google image search supports this.

I think if you or others outside the Philippines watch TFC or other TV, then you'll know current usage. I suspect it might be a shock for people who have been outside the Philippines for many years and visit, finding the language has changed. I expect that would be more of a problem in areas / languages which aren't on TV much.

[sfuqua]

I've listened to a bunch of the Tagalog course today and it looks pretty good. I'm pretty sure that it's not going to be that useful for me, but it looks good for somebody trying to break into B1/B2 Tagalog.
TFC is playing in the background right now and something outrageous just happened on Probinsyano, so the whole family is teary eyed.
I too am excited by the idea of a Cebuano course. My wife is a Cebuana, and I would love to know enough so that her extended family doesn't always have to switch to Tagalog or English to include me in the conversation.

[sfuqua]

GLOSSIKA
Tagalog30000: 200 / 30000 reps
Spanish30000: 3000 / 30000 reps
French30000: 3000 / 30000 reps

I made some pretty big changes, although it shouldn't make the investigation invalid.
First, I started Tagalog. It was strange to do reps in a language that I am quite familiar with. I would here the prompt in English and how I would say it would pop into my head and then I would get the sentence in Tagalog, and often the native speaker would say something different. It would absolutely hurt my tongue to repeat/shadow the sentence. If this course is going to help me it is because it is going to break me out of crummy habits and make me sound more native like. Sentences that hurt my mouth to say, that I can understand easily are probably good things for me to practice. This course may be more useful for me than I first thought.
Also, I decided to start following the guidelines from glossika more closely. I decided that I am not getting enough out of my Anki decks in glossika to justify thetime it takes to go through them. I'm going to start using GMS files to get a first look at the sentences I'm going. One of the standard approaches that glossika advocates to use GMS-A files every five days to introduce new sentences and then use GSR files to drill the sentences. GMS+A files have the format of L1 L2 L2. I'm going to see if I can get the same effect with the GMS-C files which have the format L2 L2, with no L1 prompt. These files are shorter. Anki files would be good for an unfamiliar language.

I'm continuing my French and Spanish sentence decks; which of course has nothing to do with glossika, and I've been surprised at how hard many of the cards are, especially the French. No wonder my reading is slow; I need a lot more work. This isn't at all discouraging at all;I guess I spent too much time with easy sentences from Assimil and Michel Thomas. Now I know what i need to do to improve my reading -- a few hundred or maybe thousand sentence cards... If the sentence cards are HARD they will be GOOD to do.

[sfuqua]

I'm 10% of the way to 30000 reps in both Spanish and French. The creator of glossika says that you shouldn't evaluate the effects of the course until you have finished 30000 reps.

So let me ignore his advice and evaluate the course after 3000 reps. There has not been a huge, life changing effect on my languages, but there has been an effect; I'm certain of it. The languages flow a little easier off of the tongue. I have no idea if this process will continue as the thousands of reps go by, but right now I'm planning on continuing past 30000 reps up to the 60000 reps that glossika recommends for a (not too hard) language.
Glossika would probably crush a complete beginner in a language who had no experience in language learning. For such a learner, it might make a great course for after Pimsleur or Michel Thomas. The course starts off too fast for a complete beginner. I could see how this course might be an ideal thing to do along with Assimil. If one did a "shadow and study" run through Assimil along with glossika, I think it might lead to pretty impressive language skills.
The GSR approach to the courses won't teach you very much about reading and writing, and I would prefer to learn this part with something like Assimil scriptorium or something.
People who like FSI may like this course, although it lacks the organization that most FSI courses have.
But, wow, they have a course in Icelandic, and Czech, and they will have courses in many more languages soon.
This company may have a bad effect on those of us prone to wanderlust.