Glossika Product Updates

[sfuqua]

Please keep publishing the messages

Perhaps glossika will work its way through this weird phase.

It is really hard, sometimes, for a business leader to realize when he is taking a turn into darkness.

I'm pretty sad, and I will admit to blowing my monthly "allowance" on glossika Italian.

Silly me; I'm not studying Italian until next year (or the year after, or....)

[Henkkles]

Personally I'm very excited about the update. The current system is unwieldy and cumbersome to both use and patch, and a software solution instead of a heap of mp3s and pdfs is an answer to my prayers. This is always what I wished that Glossika was.

I expect it to be buggy in the beginning and that there will be problems, but I hope that despite everything it will be worth using.

[crush]

I agree the current program has a lot of flaws, i don't mind the mp3s (i wrote my own app to keep track of what i need to study each day), but what would be nice is a way to view the sentence you are currently listening to. I also don't mind an app format, i've been hoping for something similar for a long while anyway. What would bother me most is having to be connected to the internet all the time to use them (i don't have a data plan on my phone and even when i did online apps like Duolingo and Memrise are so much slower than offline equivalents, and the same for dictionaries, i now only use offline dictionaries on my phone) and having to pay monthly to use it and being unable to continue studying after my subscription is over. I'd much rather purchase a course "forever" than pay monthly for it, even if it ends up being cheaper for me to pay monthly. Apparently we <i>will</i> be able to study offline and there's been no specific mention of a subscription payment method, so it's too early for me to say. Regardless of how it turns out, i'll at least test it, and i am excited to see how it turns out.

So please do post the fourth e-mail when/if you get it, Speakeasy.

[daegga]

30$ per month - quite an increase in price even if you use the equivalent of the super intensive 5 month schedule.
For a lazy learners it sums up to 300$ (10 months) or so for 1 language.
https://ai.glossika.com/pricing

[Longinus]

I just sent the following message to Glossika. I will pass along any answers I get.

I'm puzzled about a couple of things.

First, I created an account on the new website and tried a few repetitions of Russian. I don't really understand the purpose of the provided exercise. I am shown both the English and Russian text simultaneously, so when I repeat the phrase, I'm just reading the Russian. There's no "testing effect" that occurs when you try to think of the Russian sentence while hearing the English cue, as with the GSR files. The options do not allow me to turn off the Russian text. From a cognitive science perspective, there's just no way this works as well as GSR for learning. I can't imagine that reading tens of thousands of Russian sentences out loud without any recall element is going to be an effective learning method.

Does the whole "course" just consist of this activity, or does the software begin presenting the English cues without the Russian?

Second, it does not mention anywhere in the three pricing plans on the website how many languages are included. Your email implies that the cost is $30 per month per language. If these prices are per language, then this is outrageously expensive and I will not be participating. If all languages are included, at least with the annual plans, then it might be more reasonable.

Third, for the "multilingual" annual plan, it says "Unlock ALL features ..." without saying what those features are.

Bottom line, I'm going to need to know a lot more before I'm signing up for this.  Please let me know the answers to my questions.

Thanks,

[reineke]

=0)

Anyone addicted to repetition will love the repeated payments.

[Longinus]

I got an answer to my first question. All plans include access to all languages, including forthcoming ones. This makes the pricing more reasonable.

[neofight78]

20% off $30 a month to test a new product? .. err... no thanks

I was open minded until I saw the price, and I’m not normally one to watch the pennies. $10-15 seems more reasonable to me.

[Henkkles]

This is what I've understood so far:

You don't buy individual languages anymore, your subscription allows you to study all languages. This is to benefit those of us who are actively pursuing/maintaining several languages, however I'd expect people who only have a singular target language will be disappointed.

The pricing is thus:
$30 month/billed monthly ($360 per annum)
$24 month/billed annually ($288 per annum)

No sign of currency conversions as of yet, however if memory serves, the courses were previously priced so that $100 was 95€, so I'd guesstimate that it comes down to approximately 340€/275€.

So far I'm only seeing one training module, however as they instructed you to transcribe and interpret before I'd expect those to show up eventually as well.

Mike said this when asked if new courses will be published in the old format anymore:

"We will continue to publish, but it will take some time for all of our publications to adjust to the new customized formats."

Not sure what that means, hopefully that you still get to choose whether you want to subscribe or just straight up buy the course with the pdfs and all.

Personally my pain-point is around $20 per month, so I'll try to gather some more information before I decide to commit or not.

[Speakeasy]

Just a quick comment to say that I have not yet received "Message 4 of 4" concerning the updates, nor have I received an Email containing an offer to try the new products, whereas it would appear that others already have. 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? UPDATE: So as to main the continuity of this discussion, I have copy/pasted the text of Ani's post BELOW the link.

The New Glossika - General Discussion
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&p=85385#p85385

I got an email this morning inviting me to try the new Glossika beta release. I'm sure many of you did also. So far there are 20 languages available, all from an English base at this point. For now, there is no offline access but that is apparently coming.

What are your initial impressions?


Here are mine:
-- Runs super smoothly from a smartphone. Doesn't seem to demand much in data (my wifi is painfully slow).
-- Seems to be tons of options easily accessible, change rate of playback for base language, target language, spacing pause between. Option to record your voice, option to send yourself email reminders with the ability to choose which days of the week. Everything is really clean
-- Sound runs in the background so you can ignore the screen if you'd like and do the reps by audio as before.
-- After each session you can rate the sentences Easy/Normal/Hard either individually or as a set.

in about 30 minutes of playing with it, I didn't find much negative. Some of the weird sentences still exist like "He has a computer -- Il en a un", but I think with this platform they should be able to improve those things. There will also apparently be options for choosing gender of the speaker.

I also can't figure out how to have the system reassess your level after initially setting it. In looking through the French, I picked "hard" on the first sentence that used a construction that I don't have in my active vocabulary (afin que), and got placed in the A2 level with super boring sentences. I'd like to do the intake assessment again but the way to do that, if even possible, is not obvious.

I look forward to hearing what you all think!

EDITED:
(1) Copied/pasted the text of Ani's post.
(2) Adjustments to my post.