Glossika method

[TheBigZaboon]

@racebannon

 

It looks like you are getting what they promised, i.e., mainland Chinese sentences (presumably read by someone from the mainland) rather than the original Taiwanese usage recorded by a mainland Chinese speaker. That can only be good, right?

 

I'm going to hold off a bit to see what other changes they've made, for example, maybe removing foreign names from example sentences that were the source of complaints from others.

 

Keep me posted.

[racebannon]

Perhaps my previous post was not clear as it could be.   

 

In early November I purchased "Chinese Mandarin EN ZH."  It contained Fluency Modules: Basic 1, 2, and 3.  Each of the Modules (Basic 1, 2, and 3) contained 3 separate zipped folders (1 GSR folder with audio of sentences, 1 GSM folder of audio of sentences, and 1 large PDF file with the written versions of the sentences).   It was my understanding that the Mandarin in EN ZH was the standard Mandarin used in Taiwan.

 

In early December I received an email with links to updates.  I downloaded 13 zipped folders.   Six of these folders were the updates of the Basic 1, 2, and 3 GSR and GSM audio files.  One folder was the updated version of the PDF for Basic 1 (the PDFs for Basic 2 and 3 are not yet ready, thus not included in the update).  The last six folders are labeled "ZS" and include the GSR and GSM files for Basic 1, 2, and 3 spoken in Mainland Mandarin.  The Mainland Mandarin is spoken by a Mainland Mandarin speaker and the sentences are the Mainland Mandarin way of expressing the information in the English sentence, and not simply the Taiwan Mandarin way of expressing the information with a Mainland accent. 

 

For example,  to ask someone what his/her job is:

The PDF has the English:  What's your job?

It also has the Taiwanese Mandarin, this is expressed:  你从事什么工作？ Ni congshi sheme gongzuo? （In the PDF this is written in Traditional characters, but I can only write in Simplified on this computer)

It also has the Mainland Mandarin, this is expressed:  你做什么工作？Ni zuo shenme gongzuo? 

 

Sometimes the words used to express the idea are exactly the same in both Taiwanse Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin and only the accent is different.

 

 

In my previous post I mentioned that some of the sentences had completely changed from the original product I purchased compared to the update.  What I mean is that some of the sentences that were Taiwanese Mandarin ways of expressing an idea have changed to completely different Taiwanese Mandarin ways of expressing the same idea.  The example I gave was:

 

sentence #2 from the original Taiwan Mandarin version, 我不富有 = "I'm not rich".  This is a Taiwanese way of expressing "I'm not rich" and it is spoken by a Taiwanese speaker in the audio files, but in the updated version the Taiwan Mandarin expressing "I'm not rich" is now 我不是有钱人 (incidentally, the Mainland Mandarin sentence given expressing this same idea is 我不是个有钱人).

 

I brought this up because I don't know why the updated version dropped the original Taiwanese Mandarin sentence and chose to include the new expression.     Are the new choices more commonly used?  It's not a big deal, but I would like to know why.

 

I really like the Glossika products.  I can tell a lot of work has gone into them. 

[Crush]

I doubt they've removed the names, they seem to be used throughout all the courses (the same base text translated to different languages), at least comparing to my Catalan course. The sentences are exactly the same (as are the names used in the sentences) between the Catalan and Mandarin courses.

[hedwards]

@Crush, you're correct as far as I can tell. I have the Mandarin, German and Italian programs and they're all basically the same including the names. I'm not really sure that having the names is that big of a deal.

[etm001]

Hi,

 

I emailed Glossika in regards to the updated download links, and here is the reply I received:

 

We are still sending out the download links. They are quite a lot of orders so it might take a bit time considering the amount of team member we have. But we will definitely send the new links to you as soon as possible! Thank you for your patience and support!

It looks like they are handling this manually, so we'll just have to be patient while they work through their backlog.

[Crush]

That's what i figured, thanks for the information though. I'm excited to switch over to the mainland course, as well as check out the changes racebannon mentioned in the last page.

[imron]

It looks like they are handling this manually,

It boggles the mind why they don't automate more of their processes.

[Guest realmayo]

I'm looking forward to getting Mandarin<->Cantonese when the Cantonese is ready.

 

However I do think you're taking a lot on trust when you buy these things: trust first that the speaker's pronunciation is good, and second that the sentences are good.

 

For the pronunciation, I saw in the comments section here http://www.lingholic.com/glossika-review-mass-sentence-method/ Italian people saying that the Italian speaker pronounces 'r' wrong, and a Spanish person saying that some of the Spanish sentences are unnatural.

 

as I said It's not so terrible but in Italy somebody wants to correct this problem and goes to speech therapist (logopedista).

 

....

 

For example, we would never say " Mi coche necesita ser lavado" (My car needs to be washed), because we don´t consider objects to have human needs. 

 

 

Of course we don't know whether to trust the people in those comments either. For instance, for all I know it could be the case that the Spanish sentence mentioned sounds perfectly fine in Mexico/California, just not in Spain.

 

 

But I think it's normal to be nervous because the whole thing is built around heavy repetition to make these pronunciations and sentence structures second-nature, and the idea that they will be wrong is a bit scary.

 

I can easily accept that the 'Glossika method' works very well for people who are brilliant at learning languages -- clearly the guy who's behind it is awesome. And the method may well work very well for people like me who are normal at learning languages, I'd like to hope so.

 

But I'm guessing that the people at Glossika aren't fluent in all the languages offered, so they must be taking on trust that a certain, say, Finnish speaker doing the recording has suitable pronunciation and ability to turn their set list of sentences into normal-sounding Finnish.

[wibr]

I got my download links, and copy paste no more, you can actually click the links!

[Crush]

I got my download links today, too, but i'm having trouble downloading them from China. I've been trying all day and haven't been able to download them. I managed to pick up three of the "smaller" (170MB range) files with a VPN, but the larger files (the books zip file, the GSR files) time out after a half hour or so.

 

Are the links really only valid for 24 hours?

[hedwards]

@Crush, if you're having issues with it you should contact them. It's not a hard limit, if you're having legitimate problems downloading the file they can extend it. If I recall correctly, it was 36 hours for a while because people were having issues with the previous version. I'm not sure why they decided to go back to 24 hours for this update.

 

Have you tried using a download manager that allows resuming downloads?

[etm001]

@Crush said:

 

 

Are the links really only valid for 24 hours?

It's definitely not a hard 24 hour deadline. I received my links and downloaded the files after 24 hours had elapsed and had no troubles. The download was fast too (although didn't have to use a VPN).

 

I quickly browsed through the updated PDF files. It's now easy to see the differences between the Taiwanese and mainland Mandarin Chinese. For example:

 

Taiwanese: 你有看到維達嗎？

Mainland: 你看见过维达吗？

English: Have you seen Veda?

 

The "有" construction is common in colloquial Taiwanese speech for what translates to the present perfect tense in English. (Although this construction is not taught in Mandarin schools in Taiwan, at least in my experience). Another nice change was the elimination of the background image/colors used on each page (I never cared for it).

 

I haven't listened to the mainland audio yet (I not qualified to comment on it's "authenticity" in any case), but I'm guessing we should have a lot more people satisfied with the material now.

 

Now if they could only improve that website...

 

Edit/update: it also looks like file sizes have been reduced too. For example, the old Fluency 3 GSR files totaled ~3GB, but the updated version totals ~1GB. So that's a welcome change.

[Crush]

I hadn't thought about using a download manager, that's a nice idea and i'll try that now. It seems like the links are still valid, hopefully they'll last long enough for me to download everything (or at the very least the e-books file). In the meantime i've sent Glossika a message.

 

Regarding using 有, i find myself slipping a 有 or two out every once in a while now after listening to these sentences so many times ;)

[ChTTay]

Can anyone recommend a download manager for windows 8?

 

There is a 'windows download manager' you can get but it seems you can only use it with Explorer 9 (anyone even use explorer?).

 

I don't want to end up buying this (imminently) then not being able to download it. I've had trouble with large files in China from other sites. I don't have a VPN.

[gato]

Taiwanese: 你有看到維達嗎？

Mainland: 你看见过维达吗？

English: Have you seen Veda?

I think the proper mainland version should be closer to the Taiwan Mandarin version: 你有没有看到维达?

In normal usage, there is 看到 which is "to have seen" in the visual sense, and 见过 which is "to have seen" in the "to have met" sense. But I am not sure if 看见过 is a proper usage. It doesn't sound quite right to me.

[querido]

I used to use a download manager. I had forgotten about this because Chrome works so well. I can disconnect and reconnect to the internet (while leaving the browser open), and Chrome will resume the downloads from where they had been, no trouble. That is the behavior that used to require a download manager. Edit: Sorry if this doesn't apply to you.

[ChTTay]

Hi Querido，

 

Thanks, I will just try using chrome for the download and cross my fingers. I've never managed to get firefox to restart a failed download by itself.

[Crush]

I used DownloadThemAll with Firefox and left it running all day and night and was able to download everything (i think, i haven't checked all the files yet), though i used a VPN because (more than) half the time the download would refuse to start without it, and when it started it was fast but only for a short time before it stopped again.

 

Good luck!

 

EDIT: I also am curious what schedule they are using here:

"It's possible to finish one of our modules in one month [...] 2 hours weekly for 4 weeks is all you need to complete one module."

Ok, so i can finish a module in 8 hours?! The e-mail said there are "280 Hours of Training". Later they say their students are required to do an extra 30 minutes daily of listening, dictation, and recording.

 

The new instructions also don't seem to include a review section, when going through the Taiwan speaker version i was reviewing the last three or four days' worth of lessons. I also skipped the dictation section before as it didn't seem as useful to me (and mostly because writing out 50 sentences seemed like it would take a long time), i just made sure to pay attention to the tone/spelling of each word in my head as i listened to the C files.

 

The new instructions page looks much prettier now, though.

Edited December 8, 2014 at 10:41 AM by Crush

[Yadang]

Got my links, and downloaded them. Haven't checked the files yet though...

 

 

sentence #2 from the original Taiwan Mandarin version, 我不富有 = "I'm not rich".  This is a Taiwanese way of expressing "I'm not rich" and it is spoken by a Taiwanese speaker in the audio files, but in the updated version the Taiwan Mandarin expressing "I'm not rich" is now 我不是有钱人

 

I just asked my (24 year-old) Taiwanese friend about this one. I asked if I didn't have much money if I could say “我不富有". She said yes. Then I asked if I could also say 我不是有錢人。She also said I could say that too. When I asked which one she would say, though, she said she'd say 我不是有錢人。When I asked why, she said that both work, but that 我不富有 is more 正式。

This is of course only one Taiwanese person in a sea of many, but I think it's interesting what she said.

[ChTTay]

I finally ordered glossika this week. I received the download links around 2 after after I ordered.

 

I would like to say, the download links are pretty much unusable in China without a stable VPN connection. I received the links at around 9am and managed to download about 10% of one file in the first hour. With Firefox and IE's built in download tool the connection fails everytime. I installed FMD (Free download manager) which seems like a really good tool for restarting connections. Even with this installed, the download would connect for 5 minutes then fail for 20 - repeat that on a loop.

 

This was just what I wanted in the morning, especially with the spectre of a 24 hour time limit. Long story short, after buying and fiddling with a VPN at home for a while, I went to work. For some reason, had more VPN success at work. In 4 or 5 hours I managed to get 3 of the files but still had connectivitiy issues.

 

In the end, I had to ask a friend with a more reliable VPN connection to download the things for me and give them to me on a USB the next day.

 

If anyone else is in mainland China and thinking of buying these I would make sure you have a stable VPN or some other connection. Alternatively, wait until you leave China to get it. I also had thoughts of ringing my family and getting one of them to download the files then upload them somewhere that actually works in China.

 

Anyway, not a great start. Tiring.