Glossika Mass Sentence and Spaced Repetition Methods

[הענט]

I believe the GSM and GSR methods deserve their own thread. I want to make a review of this method, though I'm only halfway through the fluency 2 phase in Russian. It's plain wonderful and I'm not exaggerating one bit. For measly 70 dollars, you'll get 3000 thousand sentences in English and the target language (in my case Russian). It's divided into 3 pdf files, one for each fluency phase, each having an introduction about the methodology and the target language itself. Then you have a 20 GMS mp3 tracks per unit, subdivided in A, B, C, where the A files contain the pronunciation of the English sentence and of the target language twice, B is English - space -target language and the C is target language only. If you're not ready for this pace, then you can slow down by using the GSR method, which means that those 1000 sentences are broken down to 104 files, repeating itself just like Pimsleur is. Unlike Pimsleur the files don't have any unnecessary ballast i.e. "Imagine yourself in a Parisian café. You want to talk to a French lady and...", it's not as tedious and boring, because you can choose your own pace, even though you should do at least one GSR file a day.

70 dollars is perfectly justified by the amount of content. It's more than Pimsleur offers for 450 dollars (1,2,3,4). It surpasses Pimsleur in one more aspect. Pimsleur may have 4 phases for Mandarin or Italian, but only gives us 1/3 of a phase for Danish or Armenian. Glossika offers 3000 thousand sentences for each language, because it uses the same sentences in every language pair you choose (you can learn Italian through Swedish and so on).

I started with the GSR files, but the Russian language is at least 40% similar to Czech in terms of vocabulary and grammar, so I'm doing 50 sentences a day now with reviewing the previous sentences . I know I couldn't do this with say Japanese and that's what I love about the course the most. You can use it however you like it, skip at any time, which is pretty uncommon in ordinary excersise books. The GSR may be slow (10 months or 5 months doing 2 tracks a day), but your pronunciation will be much better if you take this path. Mike himself says, that you shouldn't bet everything on one card, so I'm using several other resources in order to support this method, but overall I'm more than satisfied by it.

Nothing is perfect, so it's natural there are some mistakes in the books, but the only one I can think of now is that shoes are translated as туфли (pumps) which could lead to a misunderstanding, especially if I told some Valuev-like Russian, that his туфли look stunning.

This is not an advertisement, but if you want to find out more about this method, I'm posting a link below.

http://www.glossika.com/

EDITED

[razlem]

Imagine yourself in a Parisian café

Why is it always a Parisian café?

But on topic, I still don't really understand the need to spend money for programs like this, especially since, as you said, there were several mistakes.

[הענט]

Yet, we spend hundreds on language books and dictionaries. You can always try to find a way to get these for free, but I believe it's great to support an idea I like. Some people may not like this method at all. I do like the part, where I absorb sentences and find grammar patterns, just like I did with my mother tongue. I'm especially fond of the IPA included. I just thought it was worth mentioning, but whatever floats their boat.

[Car]

They only have PDFs? I prefer printed books for this since I doubt they're suitable to be read on an e-reader, are they?

[voron]

but the only one I can think of now is that shoes are translated as туфли (pumps) which could lead to a misunderstanding, especially if I told some Valuev-like Russian, that his туфли look stunning.

It's not a mistake. Just type "мужские туфли" in google images and you'll see.
(A Valuev-like Russian can perfectly wear туфли is well).

[הענט]

They only have PDFs? I prefer printed books for this since I doubt they're suitable to be read on an e-reader, are they?

voron: Okay. I've been a bit doubtful about this one, but I was told so by a native speaker and I Google searched and thought it was enough evidence. Thanks for the clarification.

[Bubulus]

You can get the same type of product online for free at antosch-and-lin.com for Mandarin, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish. There's a few thousand example sentences there translated and glossed, just make an account and go on Practice Sentences once you've selected a language. No printed version though.

[Car]

They only have PDFs? I prefer printed books for this since I doubt they're suitable to be read on an e-reader, are they?

http://www.glossika.com/wp-content/uplo ... _44441.jpg

Thanks, somehow I missed that on their website.

Serafín, that's great to know, thanks!

[הענט]

UPDATE: The prices were pushed up to 90 dollars per item. I assume I jumped the gun here. Wait a few months and it'll be as expensive as Pimsleur...

[Marah]

You can get the same type of product online for free at antosch-and-lin.com for Mandarin, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish. There's a few thousand example sentences there translated and glossed, just make an account and go on Practice Sentences once you've selected a language. No printed version though.

It's awesome! Thanks for sharing. I'll recommend it to my friends.

[Luís]

You can get the same type of product online for free at antosch-and-lin.com for Mandarin, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish. There's a few thousand example sentences there translated and glossed, just make an account and go on Practice Sentences once you've selected a language. No printed version though.

It's awesome! Thanks for sharing. I'll recommend it to my friends.

I second that, it seems really good. I already use Anki as my main flashcard application, so I'm not sure if I'd be able to use them together, though.

[הענט]

The glossika website now offers a 30 day trial for free. So it's worth checking out before you consider buying one of their courses. I must say, it's brilliant for learning multiple languages at a time, because those sentences are the same and even if you just try some of these, you'll know how to say for example: My sister's a nurse in Hungarian, Armenian and Turkish.
Of course the intermediate level only come with the full package.

[Uskoton]

The glossika website now offers a 30 day trial for free. So it's worth checking out before you consider buying one of their courses. I must say, it's brilliant for learning multiple languages at a time, because those sentences are the same and even if you just try some of these, you'll know how to say for example: My sister's a nurse in Hungarian, Armenian and Turkish.
Of course the intermediate level only come with the full package.

I've tried this.. they sent the first lesson and the 2nd lesson and since I've had no more emails. Not a great impression!

[Zegpoddle]

I must say, it's brilliant for learning multiple languages at a time, because those sentences are the same and even if you just try some of these, you'll know how to say for example: My sister's a nurse in Hungarian, Armenian and Turkish.

Identical content across different languages can also be a warning sign that a series was put together by a linguistically naïve publisher. I learned this a couple of years ago when my job at a language school required me to evaluate several versions of Rosetta Stone (I test-drove Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic). There were many reasons why I ultimately advised against adopting RS for our program--not least its outrageous price--but one big red flag was that fact that the syllabus of words (and later sentences) in RS is the same in all of the languages that they offer. Take it from me, it is much easier for a native English speaker to say sentences like "My cousin is tall" in Spanish than it is in Chinese or Arabic, especially in one's first or second lesson in those languages! There is a reason why quality courses that teach Chinese or Arabic to English speakers progress much more slowly through the initial lessons than courses that teach Romance or Germanic languages. There is a lot more groundwork to be carefully laid when teaching someone a language that is very distant from their native language.

Since then, I've avoided series in which the exact same material is taught in Lesson 1 in every language they offer (and the same in Lesson 2 and so on). That's a sign of insensitivity towards the differing cognitive loads that the same topic (or vocabulary, or grammatical function) can impose on learners depending on the language (both the learner's language and the target language). Any professional linguist should be sophisticated enough to recognize those differences. Any series that ignores them was probably not designed in consultation with professional linguists. My guess is that some publishers do it to save money. "We'll pay one author to write a course to teach Spanish, and then we'll just have the thing translated into 56 other languages on the cheap!" Any marketer who says that has never tried to learn two languages from different language families.

Uniformity of teaching materials across languages is great for aspiring polyglots who are studying several languages at the same time. For everyone else, it can make some courses almost impossible to learn from easily or successfully.

[הענט]

Nah. The only thing I'm against are the same names, because when I'm learning Slovene, which is spoken by (correct me if I'm wrong) 2 million people in Slovenia, I want the names to sound Slavic, so I can use the right declension with a typical Slovene name and not like in the Glossika course (Arab, Indian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian names etc.). Well, I won't have a hard time, because my native language is Czech, but for a French dude it'd be much more useful if the names were different in each and every course.

Anyway, you're right. Both Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone use the same sentences, but that's different, because Rosetta stone starts with single words (man, woman, girl, boy , red , black) and it can become very boring if you do learn more than one language this way. Pimsleur is full of stupid English (unlike Glossika, English only) instructions, like "imagine you're sitting in a Parisian café" or " imagine you're speaking to a Afghani woman, of course if you go to Afghanistan, you should know that it's forbidden to talk to the opposite sex, but for the purposes of our......" and the typical " Chinese is a tonal language, did you hear the tone go up and then down????". So in the end, after 30 minutes you'll learn only to say stuff like: "Are you American? Do you speak English. I speak a little Hindi. etc."

You're right about the different language families, but that only means it's going to take more time to finish the course in Vietnamese, than say in Danish. Because you can probably do 50 sentences a day in a close language, but only ten sentences in a distant one.

Okay. I get your point. Eventually it may get boring you see the sentence : zhirong is watching the TV or sth like that, but that's why one should never use just one method and should combine what they like the best with other resources. For example: Pimsleur taught me some Spanish, Glossika did the same with Russian, but the only thing I learned from RS is the Greek alphabet

[הענט]

Speaking of Vietnamese. How are the courses laid out. With all those pronouns, I don't want to refer to myself as co or chi.