Glossika method

[imron]

I might be able to write a program to automate part of the process but I don't know much about programming and I haven't had any luck getting programmers who can remotely understand what I want to do

I might know of a programmer with experience writing programs that analyse Chinese texts.....

[renzhe]

imron to the rescue!

Seriously, you should give them a shout.

[Yadang]

 

Seriously, you should give them a shout.

 

I concur.

[simc]

Well to me "haven't had any luck getting programmers who can remotely understand what I want to do" sounds like "I don't know what I want either".

That's okay as long as you get paid in advance.

[Crush]

Ok, i've been going through the course much more slowly than i'd planned, i've currently gone through the first 650 sentences and so far i've found the content to be great. There are just two things that trip me up:

- The first is the use of 有 for the past tense (他有去派对) and in other constructions that just feel odd to me (like 他有在开车吗？). This doesn't exactly "bother" me, since i realize the course is based off of colloquial Mandarin as spoken in Taiwan, but it is in so many sentences and feels really odd to me. I don't really mind the Taiwan-specific vocab as it doesn't pop up that often, well apart from 脚踏车 and 计程车.

- The second is just the overwhelming use of foreign names. I wouldn't have minded a variety of Chinese names or even common English names, but trying to transliterate all these names is really just annoying to me. For example, one of the sentences i just covered was "I saw Evita (艾薇塔), but I didn't see Fausto (福斯托）." I really hate sentences like these and often just skip them. And of course it was a pain typing the names in since you can't copy/paste from the PDF ;) I realize now that the courses aren't just meant for English speakers though, since it seems every course is based off the same basic set of sentences. But it would be nice to learn some common Chinese names or at the very least transliterations of common English names.

 

Those are just my thoughts so far going through the Fluency 1 course, as a whole i think it's great and if i were planning on living in Taiwan, even better, but being in the 大陆 some things are a bit frustrating at times for me.

[etm001]

 

 

- The second is just the overwhelming use of foreign names. I wouldn't have minded a variety of Chinese names or even common English names, but trying to transliterate all these names is really just annoying to me.

Agreed, it's very annoying. 

 

 

I realize now that the courses aren't just meant for English speakers though, since it seems every course is based off the same basic set of sentences. But it would be nice to learn some common Chinese names or at the very least transliterations of common English names.

Again I completely agree. It would have been great had the audio gradually introduced the most common (last) names in Chinese.

 

 

 

And of course it was a pain typing the names in since you can't copy/paste from the PDF ;) 

People have posted solutions for extracting the text from the PDFs. For example, read this post. Also there's a developer who created a program for slicing the audio files and/or pairing them with the extracted PDF...I can't quite recall what the program is called (Workbook Audio? Edit: it's called WorkAudioBook). I'm sure someone here will post a link to the thread. (Maybe it's just me, but the search functionality on this site does not work at all).

 

 

[Mr John]

Hi all,

 

After reading through most of this thread, I have to admit that I was mighty tempted to wait for the mainland version to come out. Like some of the other posters in this thread, I have a slight aversion to the more feminine sounding Mandarin spoken in Taiwan.

 

Then I remembered when I was teaching English in China, and how some of my students expressed disapproval regarding my accent (as I was Australian rather than American). At the time, it struck me as an incredibly naive thing to focus on; as surely learning how to speak another language well is more important than what accent you eventually speak with. As an aside, there were a number of students that spoke with very strange sounding British and American accents.

 

So, in order to avoid the classic double standard that many of us express in various aspects of our lives, I decided to get over my bias and buy the Taiwanese variety. Even if it softens my manly impersonation of someone from Baoding, it'll probably help other people actually understand what I'm trying to say .

[Guest realmayo]

Crush: I agree on how annoying both those were -- I started getting rid of annoying sentences, was running an approximately 50% kill rate.

[Crush]

Mr John, it's not just the accent that's different, there's (fairly minimal) differences in vocabulary as well as some grammatical differences. There was a post about it here, which you might be interested in. There's also a quick overview on Wikipedia. For me, the biggest hurdles aren't the accent or the vocab differences but rather getting used to different ways of saying things (她有在开公车吗？ Does she drive a bus?) which sometimes i'm not sure if it's used on the mainland or not and if it isn't sometimes i'm not sure how you would say it here, so i've got to ask my friends. Overall it's a good course and i'd recommend it, but i do think i'd rather have purchased the mainland course.

 

Btw, has anyone else heard anything about the supposed "free" updates to the courses? Today i came across another typo, 时候 written as 时后 (sentence 685 in Fluency book 1). I e-mailed Glossika a week or two back about them but haven't heard anything.

[imron]

there's (fairly minimal) differences in vocabulary as well as some grammatical differences

Same as with Australian vs American English.

[Mr John]

Hey Crush,

 

I was already aware of the things that you mentioned, but thanks for the heads up all the same. The main reason I don't really mind is because my main focus is on producing more flowing, natural speech. Based on this thread, it sounds like the most annoying aspect of the package is probably all the random foreign names that have been converted into Mandarin - rather than the occasional differences in vocabulary and grammar. Imron has already covered the other thing I was going to say, so I'll just second it .     

[James藍傑]

Hey everyone, I think this is my first time posting here but I'm a long time lurker.

Having used glossika I can definitely attest to it's merits. I can now speak with much less hesitation and I'm having a lot more fun with language overall. So if you're still on the fence about this product, don't be. It's great!

I originally ordered the fluency 1 gsr and gsrpdfles back when the website was an utter disaster. While the website now looks a lot better I'm having problems locating the product I want. I'm looking for fluency 2 andpdfR files but I can only find them in bundles meaning i have to purchase level 1 products again AND the GSM files which I don't even want. I remember back in the day the GSR and GSM were advertised as two separate and distinct products so why can I only purchase both together?

Is this a choice made by glossika or is the website just so user unfriendly that I can't find what I want? It seems like they don't want my money or something :\

[wibr]

yeah looks like that... not sure why they keep adding new languages while they still have so many other things to straighten out...

[crt32]

You can just send them an e-mail, they will probably be able to sell to you exactly what you want.

It worked for me when I wanted to purchase Fluency 2 and 3 after having bought just the Fluency 1 package previously.

 

They most likely do want your money, they just suck at making websites.

[etm001]

 

 

While the website now looks a lot better I'm having problems locating the product I want. 

I had the same problem recently. I wanted to refer someone else to the Tone Drill package and couldn't find it anywhere. The same was true for the Mandarin Travel package. While the website is better than when it first launched, it still can be a struggle to use.

[ChTTay]

I was looking for an update on the Mandarin / Mainland Chinese package ... I can't seem to see an update. I also can't find it for sale.

 

Am I missing something?

[querido]

Someone said it might be included in "All updates waiting for final new version and recordings. 70%".

[hedwards]

@etm001 does Glossika have specific tone drill practice? The package I saw for that was on Sinosplice's site. http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/tone-pair-drills

 

The Glossika site has been greatly improved, but with the amount of information they have to convey, it can be easy to miss things like that, I'd be curious what they're take on tone drills is.

 

@imron, in my experience probably 90% of the time Australian English and American English are mutually comprehensible. Except when it's not. Australians are usually not too bad, but I've met Kiwis where between the odd accent and common wealth vocabulary would have been better off trying to communicate in Dutch.

[imron]

Mutually comprehensible, yes, but definitely differences in vocabulary usage. For example I understand it when an American says sidewalk, but I would never say that - I would use footpath and I can easily think of a whole bunch more like that.

[ChTTay]

I'm still waiting for Mandarin / Mainland release... I can't believe 'Armenian' is a head of this in their list of priorities. I can't see it specifically on the list of updates but I guess it might be in that '70%' bracket that querido mentioned above.

 

Surely Chinese spoken on the mainland has more popularity as a language to study compared to a few of their newest releases.

 

*sigh*