Glossika Product Updates

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crush
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Re: Glossika Product Updates: Messages 4 of 4

Postby crush » Thu Oct 05, 2017 4:36 pm

mouse wrote:I don’t like to be negative, but ever since Mike refused to make the text of their pdfs searchable due to fears of piracy, I’ve had the feeling that the company is not responsive to the needs of the consumer. The new pricing scheme and lack of beta testing I think stems from this attitude.
I kinda see where he was coming from (piracy is everywhere in China), but that always bothered me, too, and i don't think it was the most effective way to go about it. You maybe didn't have people copying/pasting making their own courses, but i doubt it did anything to stop spreading the content online. The books have been updated and now allow searching and have a nice outline/bookmark system set up to make going through the PDF really easy, so that's not really so much an issue anymore.

The customer service for me was always fine, i've gotten in touch with them a few times with comments, questions, reporting mistakes, etc. and they've always responded, generally very quickly. It took a while to hear back from them once or twice when they were really busy and sometimes Mike didn't sound super excited about hearing criticisms/suggestions, but they always took their time to answer in detail. And when folks were upset about the Taiwanese Mandarin course, they eventually re-translated and re-recorded all the sentences and offered it to us free of charge. So i have no complaints in that regard.

The pricing is high and in my opinion currently not worth it (unless you are going to be studying 50 sentences a day), i don't know if it will ever get to a point where it's worth $30/month, but eventually i'd say $20/month would be an ok price. I've seen improvements as i've used it over the past week and a half or so and it is more stable. I still think this first month should've been free, but i'm ok with just supporting the project for now.
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Re: Glossika Product Updates: Messages 4 of 4

Postby Serpent » Thu Oct 05, 2017 9:31 pm

leosmith wrote:
Speakeasy wrote:I wonder if my numerous angrily-worded Emails to Glossika, concerning their barely-functional order-processing-system might have something to do with the absence of an invitation?

Sounds like they have some very basic system problems to overcome

Overall it doesn't sound good, but this specific feature is probably intentional. People who sign up for the same mailing lists often get them at different times. It has to be done like that to avoid having your email messages treated as spam.

Also is it maybe time to remove "messages 4 of 4" from the subject? :)
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby Speakeasy » Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:30 pm

Serpent wrote: ... Also is it maybe time to remove "messages 4 of 4" from the subject?
Good idea!
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Oct 06, 2017 6:47 am

I have several of the old courses and my PDF’s are searchable. I’ve search for words loads of times. I also think they’ve been very responsive regarding the suggestions we’ve made regarding the new site. They implemented two of the suggestions I’ve made so far. There are still a lot of problems and bugs, but the site is improving all the time. I can understand that it is very expensive for some people, but hopefully, once they are ready to release it, the site will be greatly improved and maybe they can work out a sliding scale for people who only want one or two languages. I also love that they are making courses for rarer languages and offering them for free. I’m happy to support them for a year while they work things out.
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby crush » Fri Oct 13, 2017 6:04 pm

I feel similar to Brun Ugle, i don't think what they are offering is worth $30 a month, but the number of languages they have (and they will supposedly be adding language specific sentences soon) and the fact that many of those are/will be free, i'll be happy to support them for at least this first year. I'll see where i'm at next year.

Also, for me most bugs have been ironed out. My study sessions transfer from one device to another just fine. Sometimes there's a bit of lag when loading sentences, but that's basically how all web apps are. I'm also not sure what the "time left" is supposed to represent now, i think it's just a placeholder. I wish they would get a real forum rather than that Facebook group which is impossible to read, especially now that there are quite a few posts a day.
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby sfuqua » Wed Oct 18, 2017 12:44 pm

There have been a couple of cryptic posts by Michael on the Facebook page which suggest that the old product, mp3 files and pdf's, may not be completely dead.
He does mention a "return to publishing."
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:32 pm

Welsh is out and it's free too!

It's like they're trying to lead me astray. Must stay strong.

Michael mentioned that they're hoping to get a bunch of African languages done over the next year too. This is exciting.
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby crush » Fri Oct 20, 2017 9:34 pm

More Celtic languages then African languages.

I also tested out the Welsh today and am excited to go through more of it. I guess that means i'll also need to be putting SSiW back on my phone... Actually just noticed i still had the old (SSiW) course on my phone.

And i'm still hoping for Basque to come!
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby IronMike » Mon Oct 23, 2017 6:41 am

Word on the (FB) street is that those who signed up for the discounted monthly rate are now being charged the full ($30) monthly fee. That happening to anyone here?
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby Saim » Mon Oct 23, 2017 9:15 am

I've doing a bit of AI Glossika, and I'm not really sure how to use it to be honest.

When I used Glossika in the past, I completely avoided GSR and stuck to the GMS-C files (target language only). I mainly used it for transparent languages that I could already understand a great deal of, and found it difficult to continue with Turkish, so maybe GSR would be more helpful in that case. What I found with GMS was that it was a great way to activate a language you already have a passive understanding of. I often shadow TV shows to get a similar affect but it doesn't give you the same succession of dozens upon dozens of useful sentences; GMS is simply a very efficient way to drill a large amount of sentences.

I've been trying to repeat this method with Slovak on the ai. programme but it doesn't seem to be possible. I thought I would just be able to listen to the audio and avoid the text (I can already read Slovak so why would I drill text of basic sentences?), but the thing is that I have to rely on the algorithm which gives me a huge amount of repetition of sentences that just isn't enjoyable or efficient. Most of the sentences it throws at me are immediately comprehensible, so drilling them several times in the same session is intensely boring, but I don't want to skip them either because I wouldn't be able to produce them accurately -- I'd much prefer to work in batches of fifty sentences per session (that I would then revise throughout the week while out and about) as per the old GMS system. A work-around I made was to put 50 sentences in the "deleted" category and then consult the list and download all the audio, then binding them all together in a single mp3 file with half a second of silence in between each sentence. Although once I'm already going through so much effort maybe I should just try and find a phrasebook with audio or a course with lots of audio that isn't slowed down (I absolutely hate slow, choppy audio in courses).

Maybe the algorithm is useful if you're dealing with a non-transparent language that you want to put a lot of effort into in the short term (I could imagine if I wanted to prioritise Mandarin, learning it almost from scratch, this system would be a really useful supplement to a more structured course) but if you just want to activate a language you already understand fairly well it doesn't seem to be particularly helpful.

IronMike wrote:Word on the (FB) street is that those who signed up for the discounted monthly rate are now being charged the full ($30) monthly fee. That happening to anyone here?


I'm not surprised, Glossika seems unfortunately quite bad at explaining what their offers actually entail. For a while no-one seemed to be sure whether access to every language was limited to early adopters or was part of the basic package (because of the ambiguous way the fact that we have access to all languages was worked into the promotion emails, as a way to soften the blow of how much it costs).

I'm glad that the site wasn't working for me when I tried to redeem the earliest coupon. :lol:
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