Glossika method

[cliveface96]

@Flickserve thanks for the reply, I was previously recording Skype sessions but I stopped mainly because I just didn't have enough time (with uni + other commitments) to split it up anymore. I might try it out as having a good base of sentences to branch out from does seem to be what I'm missing at the moment. That being said 150 USD is a load of money even if it is for a year + uni is about to get a whole lot more full on next year. 

[Flickserve]

15 hours ago, cliveface96 said:

That being said 150 USD is a load of money even if it is for a year + uni is about to get a whole lot more full on next year

 

Since you are a full time student, I would be a rather hesitant to recommend it. 

 

I would go through sentences that you had before (because of familiarity) and of necessary, get someone to re-record them. If you are going to practice speaking and fluency as the primary objective as an exercise, it looks to me it’s best if you already know the vocabulary rather than trying to integrate it with whole bunch of new vocabulary. After all, we might know all the vocabulary in a sentence but get mixed up in the order of words or intonation or tones. Every single piece of new vocabulary is an additional distraction. 

[Flickserve]

Been playing with the glossika Web app for a week. All I have been doing is repeating the sentences as there are some other options available. It took a few days to get used to the style of learning. There is an option to mark sentences as easy but none to mark them as hard. Strange that. There are only two repetitions of the target sentence but why not have the flexibility to increase it to four?

 

I initially set the native language to English and target to Mandarin Beijing. First there was a placement test to test your listening skills and place you at a certain level. I got A2 for Chinese Beijing and B1 for Chinese Taiwan. Also tried the Cantonese - it stopped at B1

 

Disappointed in that it does not have stronger 儿话音. Sentence structures look fine but some queries do come up. I like the Web based feature so I can quickly look at the sentence. It was pretty difficult to do that with the old MP3's, in fact I never even opened the pdf. It is very convenient to use on the smartphone and you can do a few repetitions when there is a temporary lull in your day. It does mean that I can access the learning incredibly conveniently and literally utilise odd moments during the day. 

 

Not sure after a week that I have had a noticeable improvement. Some sentences are new vocabulary so I had to get learn those before thinking I can mark it as done. There are some other functions such as translation or dictation. Haven't delved into that but I think this is now a much better product. It's a pity that the original pricing is 30 usd a month which I consider pretty expensive. 15 usd a month that I got would capture so many more customers. 

[emuboy]

Some strange names/places to include in basic sentences though. Often uses English names like Oliver and random places like Buenos Aires, bit tough to pronounce but good practice nonetheless I suppose!

[Flickserve]

Yeah. Hate the names myself. I just don't take pronouncing names seriously. 

[emuboy]

Anyone have thoughts on Glossika's SRS system? You seem to do a new card for 4-5 days then it disappears for good. Not sure if I particularly like this approach as it doesn't seem to be enough time to fully memorise it for me. Anyone persisted with it for a while know if those cards eventually come back or is that it?

[Crush]

The older intensive schedules were a bit better, you reviewed the sentences several times and got about 90k reviews overall for the 3000 sentences. The new schedule as you said shows you the sentence for four or five days (depending on whether you're studying more than or less than 15 new sentences a day) and that's it. Obviously over the course of 3000+ sentences you're going to see words and phrases repeated. Mike's said that the goal isn't to memorize the sentences or even the vocabulary but to internalize the structures and i remember him mentioning his "dislike" towards classic SRS systems like Anki/Supermemo/Mnemosyne.

 

However, if you are only dedicating 20-30 minutes a day to Glossika, the new schedule and old schedule is pretty much the same, you'd get a similar experience to the old one by studying 20+ sentences a day, though with the old intensive schedule (about 1.5-2hrs a day) you'd have an extra review a few days later to help solidify things.

 

Re: names, i personally skip them. I just use ta(men) or just hum the name. That makes the sentences unnecessarily hard, you're learning something that for most people is going to be absolutely useless and just cause you a lot of headaches. The Cantonese course uses the original names, which is what i and most people would probably do in a normal situation. Anyway, try it out and see if it doesn't make the course less painful for you. For place names, shorter ones or ones i think i'd like to know i'll learn, especially country names, but long city names (like Buenos Aires) i tend to skip or just 乱说.

[Tomsima]

My two cents: if you're looking to use Chinese professionally in a bilingual office environment, learning how to say Western names in Chinese will be useful, learning place names invaluable. Buenos Aires is an example of something that will inevitably be of use in 'international' conversations. Thus, I personally like this approach, even if it seems pointless at the beginning.

[Crush]

Yeah, but if you're going to need those things professionally you'll learn them in context and on your own. "Buenos Aires" is definitely not in the top 5k of most frequent words, neither are the names. Likewise, if someone wants you to call them by their Chinese name, they're going to tell you their Chinese name, they're not going to say "我叫Tom" and expect you to call them 汤姆. It would be far more useful to use native Chinese names, but as the sentences were all mined from English grammar books the names are a bit all over. In my experience, a lot (well, maybe not a lot, at least some) of the city and place names apart from the big ones like New York and Paris are unfamiliar even to native Chinese speakers, unless they've either lived there or visited the place.

 

 So in my personal opinion, the names are more of a headache than anything else and you can safely skip over them, how often are you going to be talking about Buenos Aires in China anyway? If you are working with Latin American countries in China you'll learn the names through context anyway, but how many of us (in China or elsewhere) are working with Chinese people with business relations in Buenos Aires? I don't mind it so much now as i just skip over it, but when i first started using Glossika it caused me a lot of headaches ? I don't mind learning the country names, though, for the most part they're short anyway.

[emuboy]

Yeah country names are definitely useful, as are some obvious place names (e.g. Paris). Think I'm gonna stick with it for a while, as with everything in Chinese learning it seems it takes about 3 or 4 months to actually know whether it's worth doing or not (and generally anything you do consistently seems to pay dividends).

Thanks guys !

[Flickserve]

I have had it for over two weeks. Manage to still at it which is a good sign!

[querido]

Edited for brevity, sorry.

[Crush]

Btw, i've been working on an Android app to basically turn the old mp3/pdf files into something similar to the new Glossika web app called Natibo. It's a bit complicated to get set up as the scripts to split the pdf files into individual sentences only really work on Linux (audio splitting scripts work on Windows/Linux), but once you've got it set up you can use it to mix and match languages to your heart's content. It's still in very early stages of development, but i use it every day to study my old mp3 courses (Cantonese and i've paid translators to make Basque and Shanghainese courses as well which i'm studying as well) and, while still a bit buggy, it's all offline (main disadvantage for me of the web app) and i don't have to flip through pdf or mp3 files anymore (main disadvantage of the old courses). There are also more options to customize the courses and a lot more is planned so you can pretty much study however you like.

 

If anyone else was interested in testing it out, i'd be happy to help you get your old mp3/pdf packs working. It only supports the latest updates to the courses, not the earlier ones (so if you've downloaded the courses from "other" sources, those are probably not going to work).

[Flickserve]

Here a few things about the mandarin Beijing course which I don’t quite like:

 

- No male voice.

 

- Mandarin (Beijing). Why not Mandarin (mainland)? 

 

- The speaker seems to say longer sentences faster.

 

- The enunciation seems a little unclear though still native. Fine if you already have a hang of the language. Slightly difficult if you are a learner.

 

- Would like an option of listening to the sentence three times instead of two and gain an extra repetition. Even though it’s supposed to come around again, I always sort of fumble on the first repetition because I am still trying to get the word pattern. 

 

- Tones are a bit flattish for me. This is a bit contentious because if I train speaking, I feel following a really good first tone and fourth tone or double fourth tone would help a long way to reducing speaking errors on tones. However, that’s a bit artificial if you want to jump to native style speech straight away. If you are the sort of person who is a bit fastidious on training tones and pronunciation as an intermediary step to native speech, the glossika mandarin recordings may not be for you. I do find it is good for some extra listening skills.

 

- mentioned would like a stronger 兒化音 in a previous post

 

- I still find the names really really really really annoying. 

 

 

It is still early days and I have only had one conversation speaking mandarin which went relatively ok. I have got around 5k reps and one is supposed to be above 50-70k to start seeing results. Missed a few days recently due to a particularly heavy work schedule. 

[Flickserve]

Despite good intentions, I didn't get much done this month. Too much time spent eating over Chinese New Year.

 

Still on the upper end of 5k reps but suddenly my interest went up yesterday. There was a new bunch of A 1 sentences with a male voice with better tones and better rhythm. I really enjoyed it. Far more interesting than the original monotonous female voice. I think the switching between different voices also keeps things interesting. You can have an effective training system but it is only as strong as it's weakest link.

 

I am not sure if I am absorbing the grammar.

 

[querido]

Glossika website might be down at the moment. I can log in but can't get to "Progress" or "Session".

Does anyone else see this? Thank you.

 

It's fixed. Either:

1) I didn't notice my popup blocker was on?

or, more likely,

2) It is probably the case that they don't want you to be logged in on more than one computer (in different locations?) at the same time. On computer #2 I had started an additional language but didn't log out, and when it let me back in again at either location, that added course was gone. That's too risky, so I'll stick to one computer now.

[lechuan]

Just signed up for Glossika today with their Black Friday discount. I just started learning Cantonese, so I'm going to test it out on that (and try Mandarin if I have some more time). I'm still on the first "phase" (typing out the sentences from the audio/characters), and this is really helping me to learn the phonetic jyutping spellings.

[roddy]

How does Glossika work now if you are primarily using it on mobile, or hands-free while running? A quick look makes it seem like still a desktop-first arrangement. 

[lechuan]

Yes, need a desktop browser to take full advantage of Glossika. The audio recording function doesn't work on iOS Safari, but otherwise seems functional. Unlike the v1 mp3s, the web app is highly interactive, so can't be used for listening while doing other things.

[Jan Finster]

I read through much of this thread. I have several questions if anyone is happy to share their thoughts:

a) is there any benefit in doing both the Taiwanese and the mainland version? Or would this rather "hurt" your pronunciation as you may end up speaking a mix of both (plus your native accent)? Are the sentences the same or do you get "more" sentences if you complete both versions?

b) could you not achieve the same results with something like Chinesepod (i.e. playing audio of individual sentences and repeating them)? As far as I can see, Chinesepod appears to offer a lot on top of that, which would be a surplus.

c) how long would it take to complete the whole Glossika Mandarin course? (is a 12-month subscription worth it or will I be "done" after 4-6 months)