Glossika Product Updates

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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby PeterMollenburg » Sun Jan 21, 2018 10:42 pm

That’s pretty bloody awesome if all those minority languages, once ready, will be free. I’m def. interested (but not ready yet to seriously consider using it, as I’m not ready to learn a minority language or two just yet). Thanks for the clarification guys!
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby languist » Sun Jan 21, 2018 11:33 pm

Michael Campbell wrote:List of languages to add to Glossika (the 2018 strategy):
Abaza, Abkhaz, Acholi, Adyghe...

If they begin alphabetically, I will already be extremely happy. :D However, I feel like he just copied a list of all the known languages in the world from wikipedia and posted it with no real conviction. Okay, I know this is an unfounded and scathing assumption to make, but it's hard to believe that any one company could be working towards such a grand goal - and in one year. I sincerely hope they are, and will love them forever if they follow through.

On reflection, I think this is exactly what he has done. I don't think this is a concrete project list, but merely a list of every language which Glossika does not yet have content in, and the announcement that they plan to one day have content in every language... much less a plan than an aspiration or even business philosophy? I do hope they start working towards it, though.
Last edited by languist on Sun Jan 21, 2018 11:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun Jan 21, 2018 11:43 pm

Henkkles wrote:Finally Swedes will be able to learn Elfdalian and Gutnish!


I wonder who they'll hire to record sentences in those languages... Gutnish isn't very alive. The society has about 500 members, and not everyone there speaks it. I think Elfdalian has strong(er) support among natives (and polyglots).
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby Axon » Mon Jan 22, 2018 6:55 am

From what I've seen of the Facebook comments, that list is based on languages that they have at least some connection to. I remember there was some tiny post a while back about a partnership with a Native American linguistics organization, and of course Michael has been deeply involved in the Taiwanese Aboriginal communities and organizations for more than ten years.

But on the other hand... Vulgar Latin? Miwok? Volapük? Ainu? I imagine that even if they do hunt down the few people alive who can reliably produce and record content in these languages, we're not getting anything like a full Glossika course. Maybe something like the 50Languages material, which is much more basic, plus some interesting examples of the unique aspects of each. A possible worse scenario is that the vast majority of these courses get done with Michael reading out phonemic IPA, the way he did with the Thao course that only briefly saw the light of day. Though he did mention contacting people who spoke related languages to try and get a good accent for some of the dead language materials.
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby Axon » Mon Jan 22, 2018 6:57 am

Also, here's the latest email that was sent out.

****

I'm Michael Campbell, the founder of Glossika, and I'm reaching out to all of our users to let you know why I'm so excited:

1. New Must-Have Features
2. Glossika is changing relationships one at a time
3. Two great ways to use Glossika for free
4. Platform for developing new languages
5. Glossika language difficulty calculator
6. Syntax is fun and amazing

New Must-Have Features

This week, we're going to start rolling out new training tools for each language, to give you extra sentence and vocabulary training. This is the first of many new training tools that we're getting ready to roll out. Each language will get released once we've tested them.

With the Dictation tool you can now practice writing down what you've heard.

The new Typing tool works similarly to the Dictation tool. You can use this to help you learn the writing system of a language through transcription. You can also use it to improve your IPA reading skills.

For example, if you only know Pinyin and you want to improve your Chinese characters, this tool shows you the Pinyin and asks you to type the sentence in Chinese characters. Since typing Chinese has a smart function built in, your success rate should be pretty good, but there are always a few minimal pairs that you'll need to learn how to differentiate. The same applies to Japanese.

The typing tool only works in one direction: it gives you a transcription of your choice (IPA, romanization, or other) and asks you to type the language in its standard writing and spelling.

The fill-in-the-blank tools works in a very similar way to the tools above, but only tests you on identifying one word in the sentence.

The translation tools ask you to translate sentences, either by text or audio.

And finally are the alphabet learning tools which are similar to the alphabet games that we created last year. These are new, updated versions that integrate with our new system.

Since September 2017, we've launched the following languages on Glossika: Azerbaijani, Bengali, Croatian, Danish, British English, Irish, Manx, Norwegian, Persian, Sorani Kurdish, Southern Vietnamese, Swedish, Tagalog, and Welsh.

Glossika is Changing Relationships One at a Time

Jennifer has an amazing story and she decided to reach out to me directly and tell me what happened. I asked her permission to share this story with everybody else. This is what Jennifer has to say about Glossika:

"Glossika has completely transformed and healed many of my relationships with family members... My mind feels incredibly nimble... I find Glossika incredibly powerful and transformative."

As a heritage speaker of both Spanish and Korean, Jennifer’s fluency in those languages decreased as she went through the U.S. school system. Because of this, she frequently became stressed using Spanish or Korean and made her feel less authentic. As a result, she remained silent and disconnected in these family exchanges.

Jennifer believes that linguistic distances create psychological distances. And we all know this is true based on our personal experiences.

Jennifer now works at an elementary school where she witnesses children experiencing the same pain she once felt before. Recently a kindergarten student came to her bursting into tears because she couldn't speak Spanish, the only language her mother can speak. This moved Jennifer to make a difference in this child's life.

For herself, after using Glossika's platform regularly, Jennifer's family members noticed a significant boost in her fluency and accuracy. Her relationship with her family has completely transformed and healed over the last couple of months.

Jennifer is now on a mission to help heal many more families that are feeling these linguistic distances by bringing Glossika to more classrooms.

Healing linguistic distances not only helps families, what you gain from knowing another language helps people from different backgrounds better understand each other. This reduces the bias and prejudice we experience in society every day. Speaking a different language is not an "us vs them" or trying to be exclusive, it is merely the best and most convenient way to express oneself intimately with the people closest to you.

Jennifer says: "I am greatly indebted to Glossika. Glossika is an extremely powerful and transformative language learning system."

Two Great Ways to Use Glossika for Free

There are a number of free courses (with unlimited reps) on Glossika: Catalan, Hakka, Kurdish, Manx, Taiwanese, Welsh, and we're working hard to add more languages to this list! Keep an eye out for Scottish Gaelic coming to Glossika very soon.

Anybody can take advantage of discounts or even a full month for free on Glossika. Glossika is still mostly unknown to the general public and as a small company with limited resources, one way for us to say "thank you" to you is when you tell your friends about Glossika and they become a dedicated user.

When your friend signs up using your link, your friend gets $5 off their first month and we give you $10 that you can redeem towards your next month. This is cumulative, so the more people you recommend, the more savings you gain.

Learn more about our referral program here. [omitted link to referral program]

Platform for Developing New Languages

We've been busy figuring out how to add more of what you want at Glossika (like Persian, Hebrew, Romanian, Bulgarian, and much more).

If you or a friend want to see something get added to Glossika, whether it's expanding Arabic or adding Zulu, then we're building the tools to allow that to happen.

You'll be able to edit, translate, record, create and edit transcriptions, and much more. We've worked hard to streamline a lot of our production processes to make this a reality.

Our future emails will announce these important updates, so make sure you're the first to know.

Glossika Language Difficulty Calculator to the site

Please let us know if you'd like us to add a language difficulty calculator. We've been working hard on making lots of improvements to it. Here are a couple snapshots of the results on a map.

[omitted maps of language difficulty]

Syntax is Fun and Amazing

I've worked on syntax every day for the last four years. And every day I discover something new and interesting. There are so many fascinating things I could talk forever about, but this is perhaps that one corner of linguistics that could win the "most boring" award. So I will try not to bore you.

Our new syntax database is getting a major update, and this will affect all algorithms that deliver sentence training to you. Just like all other algorithms you come in contact with daily, whether it's email routing, Google search or Facebook feeds, you will experience an improvement. Since you are learning, this will have a long-term impact on the effectiveness on how well you learn.

The first thing that we've improved is the issue of granularity: we're making several new layers of syntax-semantic mapping with differing degrees of granularity. This will improve how you progress through a course, master a pattern, move to the next level, and the amount of vocabulary diversity that you are exposed to within each pattern.

The second thing is improved definitions of structure. We've improved the analysis in the following areas:
1. predicate clauses attached to stative verb heads
2. causative induced states (animate vs inanimate)
3. resultative compliments and goal states in stative verb arguments
4. active verb differences between achievements, accomplishments, and active accomplishments
5. improved each of the role descriptions of verbal arguments
6. correlation between time events verb class

The third thing is something entirely new. I've been asking myself: How can I bring syntax to the world without presenting it like a boring encyclopedia entry that only a few people can understand?

All these fancy labels and terms don't mean anything to anybody, but yet everybody manipulates these things naturally in every day speech. Where is the disconnect in this understanding?

This is why I'm working on adding all new Sentence Pattern Descriptions to Glossika with colorful interacting parts. You'll be able to look up all the structures for any language that you're learning and see how the grammar works without having to decipher it from long convoluted text explanations.

****
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby Henkkles » Mon Jan 22, 2018 11:54 am

Honestly seems like they're headed in the right direction. The lack of actual exercises like dictation has barred me from really seeing the utility of using Glossika for now, but once everything is implemented I'm going to consider subscribing.
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Jan 22, 2018 1:24 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:
Henkkles wrote:
PeterMollenburg wrote:There is extremely little chance that I would want to study multiple minority languages at once to take advantage of the way their membership/purchase access works, and I don't like the idea of being 'pushed' to study multiple languages at once.

Hold up, wasn't it canon that all minority languages will be free to study forever? I can't find any evidence for this on a brief skim but have I been so deluded to cook this up on my own, can someone else confirm this?

That’s how I understood it. As I recall, Michael Campbell said that minority languages would be free and that subscriptions for the major languages and official languages would pay for their work on minority languages. That’s one of the reasons I’m happy to pay for the subscription.


If they publish at least one of the minority languages I'm interested in then I'd consider paying to support that. As of now, that long list is a lot of promise and little delivery so far. It basically promises about 5-10 new languages a month.

Next time we meet I want to see how you use this sentences/tool.
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby Saim » Mon Jan 22, 2018 2:17 pm

languist wrote: However, I feel like he just copied a list of all the known languages in the world from wikipedia and posted it with no real conviction.


The list does look kind of ridiculous but if it was all the known languages in the world it would be at least fifteen times longer.
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby Serpent » Mon Jan 22, 2018 2:49 pm

Looks more like a list from something like omniglot or unilang...
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Re: Glossika Product Updates

Postby languist » Mon Jan 22, 2018 4:36 pm

Saim wrote:
languist wrote: However, I feel like he just copied a list of all the known languages in the world from wikipedia and posted it with no real conviction.


The list does look kind of ridiculous but if it was all the known languages in the world it would be at least fifteen times longer.


I was being slightly hyperbolic - but the list he posted is rather close to the standard lists you would see on somewhere like forvo or indeed omniglot - and I mean, the entire list.
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