@@sharonoddlyenough Haha! Shhh, Aron! Shh! The owners of YT might hear you and we are here on their discretion, we are only guests at this party. :-D Algorithms are their money-makers, the owners only care about our likes and views.
I don't think anyone would confuse this for a sponsored review 😂 I've never personally tried Glossika, and I can't say I'm eager to try it after watching this!
I kinda am actually, though namely for certain lesser languages (that LingQ still hasn't added). Speaking of, I always wanted to love LingQ as much as I love Steve K, but it's never clicked for me. Though nothing really has, so that may be a 'me' problem I should sort out. @Days of Basketballers 'n' Swedish, looking forward to video part deux.
@@thomascrownbuerger That is one benefit, for sure! I'm lucky in that the languages I'm currently interested in have a plethora of resources available.
Glossika is a very powerful resource when used right. There are bugs in the system and translation errors but it offers a lot of comprehensible input in Target language. If you know the basic understanding of a language and how the grammar works, Glossika will suit you. Not for extreme beginners since it doesn't have any explanation.
I started a ground zero to learn Italian with Glossier and it is definitely working. I can go at my own pace. I use the internet for some grammar explanation at times.
Glossika used to sell their content as audio courses. They had 3 sets of 1000 sentences for big languages. I found the old audio courses online and listened to English- Chinese and English - Japanese many times on my runs. It was helpful for my getting used to the languages and I am sorry to hear that the current form of Glossika is such an overpriced mess. I was tempted to buy subscription for seeing the transcripts of Japanese sentences but now I hesitate to do it more than before when I already found the high pricing itself quite off putting.
I'm right here with you. I remember when they cut off the box orders and went full subscription model. There wasn't an improvement in the content, they didn't generate new sentences from banks of vocabulary and sentence templates, and the cost was through the roof. Recently got a month long free trial and I can't think of a reason to use it when I've got Speakly lifetime (thanks Lamont)
Thank you for making this video! I subscribed 2 months ago and I am doing the Mexican Spanish course, I'm about 7000 reps in and I have to admit I made a serious mistake wasting all the money on this. First of all what a snooze fest. i can't keep my concentration after 10 minutes, it's that boring. Then it always seems to hang all the time! I have been a user of numerous apps and programs over the last 2 years and honestly so far the best 3 courses I've used for Spanish so far are Speakly, Wlingua and Fluencia. Keep the the good videos!
Thanks for the review, and I'll be looking forward to part two. I used Glossika a few years ago to improve my Spanish, and I got some very good results. I will probably use the program again with another language. I agree with most of your complaints, but I know of anything else out there that improved my fluency as rapidly and effectively. There were some bad translations and poorly worded sentences. Not very many, but enough to be annoying. I used an earlier release, and I know they've added some functions since then, and that might be good or it might not be so good because it makes it more confusing for the user to figure out which functions to use. I did not use the typing mode. I did not use the listening only mode. The only mode that I found very useful was the listen and repeat mode, which I would use sitting in front of the computer. And I did that once a day for 25 minutes. When I started with Glossika, I was at a level where I had a decent passive vocabulary and could read a magazine and understand most of it, but I was still a very clumsy speaker. I had the knowledge of the language, but not the ability to speak fluently. Working with Glossika. I didn't do the entrance exam. I don't remember if they had one back then. I just jumped in and flagged the sentences as too easy and very quickly I was working with sentences at a more appropriate level. I was doing the listen-and-repeat mode, and I'd be uttering a sentence every 10 seconds or so. They use the metaphor of weight-training, where they count the number of "reps." I was working with a tutor at the time, but I was pretty busy at work and I hadn't scheduled any classes with her for I guess it was three or four months. And then when I met with her again, all of a sudden I found myself able to speak and I was asking myself, "Where is all this stuff coming from?" I concluded it was all these thousands of reps with sentences in different patterns that I practiced with Glossika. It can get a little bit boring, and I found that the 25 minutes a day was about right so that I wouldn't get burned out. I will probably use it again with a different langauge when I was at a level where I was reading pretty well but still not at a good speaking level. I would get the monthly subscription (not the yearly) and only use Glossika for a stretch of a few months, as long as it takes to get through the entire course once, and then end the subscription. I would concentrate on the listen-and-repeat mode and pretend that the others don't exist. I would skip over the placement test. Glosssika certainly has its flaws, but what it does well, it does better than any other product I am aware of.
Your experience mirrors my own with Hindi. And I agree with your conclusion. Flawed, but very effective. Not many good alternatives out there, especially for the language I was studying. Also did the same with the subscription... did the year for $150 (end-of-year special). Definitely the way to go. Honestly, I felt the discounted price was OK, considering the program does actually work pretty well.
I listened to all of Hindi A1, in "listening only mode", and it was quite helpful, despite all the other downsides noted. It's actually really really difficult to get good nontrivial beginner content and hindi, and this really helped me bridge the gap. Ya, it'd be way better if it were actually simple stories instead of individual sentences, but it worked out.
When I was learning Mongolian a few years ago, Glossika was the only place I could find a legitimate Mongolian course. I'm sad that he deleted all his old videos from RUclips. They were such an inspiration to me when I was learning Chinese 10 years ago.
@@jsweebles2150 To be honest, not super far. Resources are very few and far between, or a little outdated. I did do some classes with Nomiin Ger school in UlaanBaatar, which does online classes too, and that was definitely the biggest help. To me, it's the most beautiful language in the world. I really wish it had more attention!
@@nihaokellar180 Yeah I tried a while back I wasn't in a good position already studying Indonesian at the time though. Seems other than the classes you mentioned you pretty much have to pool together resources for it. Once I try again maybe I can use a mix of those and maybe a tutor on Italki. But yeah I agree it is beautiful I just hope to see more to be produced in the coming years. I hope your language journey goes well. As for meeting them HelloTalk is pretty good I think.
Here is how I use the program and find it helpful for pronunciation / prosody practice and to learn new sentence structures and vocabulary. For learning new sentences: 1st Rep: Listen to Source language (SL) - listen to / read along with target language (TL) - repeat TL Reps 2 thru 5: Listen SL - respond in TL before audio without pausing program - Chorus TL with audio For review sentences: Listen to SL - respond in TL before audio w/o pausing - Chorus TL with audio Doing this I get to practice recall and production. However, I agree that it has problems with translation errors and is quite expensive. I was also confused as to why the native speakers didn't sent in these sentences for correction while they were recording the audio. I have also noticed that sometime the audio doesn't match the translation. That may be an example where the native speaker changed the audio translation to match but the written was never updated. Despite the above issue and the ones you mentioned, I still feel that it can be a good resource for smaller languages. I am currently using it for Scottish Gaelic which is a free language that doesn't really have a good audio course alternative. I don't rely on this program as my only learning source, which is how I am able to notice errors in translation, an occasionally post in different forums question about the sentences in Glossika for clarifications. So I wouldn't recommend it as a primary learning source but if you need a decent source for native audio it can be useful.
I used it for a few months a few years ago, and I remember having a lot of the same complaints. It’s way to expensive for something that only repeats sentences to you when you could just shadow an audiobook or make audio flashcards from your immersion content. It’s behind the times, honestly.
Thank you so much for this! I've been trying to use Glossika on and off for years now. It clearly has "Something" going for it and you CAN learn from using it but it's so expensive, time consuming and boring that it's hard to justify the cost (in money, time & motivation) especially when there are alternatives out there that are free/cheap and far more customizable
You are spot-on about Glossika's dismal quality control performance. With Serbian as my target and German my source language I wearied of submitting feedback notes for inaccurate and inadequate translations. In some instances the translation was the exact opposite of what the target sentence meant. I put all that down to growing pains and Mike Campbell's zeal to pump out as much material and as many languages as quickly as possible.
Thanks for doing this much-needed review of Glossika. I've put in over 140 hours into it in Turkish and how I use it has changed dramatically. My latest way of using it is to listen to the sentence in English, pause, try n say what the corresponding sentence in Turkish is, then resume playback to hear the answer. I feel this has been helping me a bit with my output, and I just see it currently as a tool to help with output. However, I'd only been using it lately cause they sent me a discount. The regular price is hard to justify.
@@daysandwords Living in Turkey. Hehe. It's a really tough language for English speakers. You kinda have to wire your brain to think backwards (compared to English) but its grammar is fairly regular/consistent.
I like it - good way to use it. One of the flaws is that Glossika that it is likely going to be used "passively" by the user. The activities it uses to make it more "active," such as typing in "practice mode," are not very good and impractical. It works best in just "listening only" mode. Anything else will just take too long. Just doing "listening only" mode took about 7-8 months to do whole program, A1 to C1. "Practice mode"? No thanks. To do "active" practicing, I copied and pasted the new sentences into a document and tested my ability to recall the sentence, both directions. I used the Goldlist method for this. I think you really do need some form of "active" recall practice to get the sentences to "stick" in your head.
I'm using it now for Swahili. It's not great, admittedly, but it's the best resource I've found for this particular language once you've done Language Transfer to get a foundation. I also use Drops a little, but that has its own (different) limitations.
My personal experience is that Glossika is the Best “program” to learn from if youre too lazy to mine anki sentences or can’t find audio for your language cards to go along with your listening and reading. Also the placement test is too easy but I was able to test back to the level I wanted.
I think that is the best way to look at it. Yes, you could create your own deck for free in Anki, SRS and everything, but that will take a lot of work. Essentially you are paying Glossika a fee for to automate that process for you. Up to you to decide if it is worth it.
Just my personal experience, but Glossika was indispensable for me in getting to Japanese fluency (My job demands constant use of the language). I personally enjoy it a lot, but day by day it can definitely get quite boring. However, in sticking with it I made much progress. At the end of the day everybody's experience will be different for sure- and it is definitely pricey. BUT- I tend to use it for more than one language now so I feel like it helps justify the price (in my case) to some extent.
3:50 One Major Problem I Have With The Placement Test Is That It's Multiple Choice For The Full Thing, You Could Get A Question Right Simply By Recognising One Word, Which Only Appears In One Of The Answers, Even If You Have No Idea At All What The Rest Of The Sentence Means.
I won't be trying out the subscription system after hearing this review. When I did the Brazilian Portuguese course there were so many errors it wasn't even funny. Things like, the Sun goes around the Earth (in the Portuguese version) when the English clearly said the contrary. That being said, those errors were fixed in a later version of the audio files (pre-subscription format). But I'm not going to use Glossika for a language that I already understand at a C level. Another issue that I have with Glossika, which can also be seen as a benefit, is the same I have with Olly Richard's books: they are the same in every language. This really misses the mark when it comes to being able to teach things that are particular to the target language. And since things are being translated from English all of the target languages end up being taught through the perspective of English. Which is exactly how the translations end up being unidiomatic. It would be so much better to have a system similar to Glossika that starts with the target languages as the base and gives the translations in English. BUT, that is super impractical given the goals of Glossika as a platform back when it was initially created. You just would not be able to go from any language to any of the others. But given the translation issues, I would be seriously cautious about doing that any way as small errors can compound. If a sentence in Italian has a small error and you are learning the same sentence in Portuguese which has a small error, it is now a big error. The two sentences, when taken together, may not even make sense at that point.
By the way, I notice your reviews mostly (all?) focus on apps and websites, but I feel like for an input heavy approach, a lot of the old Book/CD courses like Assimil are sometimes the most direct way to get input and are less restrictive (although I guess some of these have apps now too). Do you think you might cover some of these other methods in the future, or is there a specific reason you haven't focused on them ? I realize a lot of these have already been covered by people like Alexander Argüelles, but since you have a lot of app review videos and stuff on input based learning, it might be interesting if you weighed in on how the current apps compare to older structured book+CD input methods in some form.
I got a B2 High in Spanish when I've only been learning Spanish for 2 months. I was only able to guess the answer because I knew one of the words that was said.
Hi Lamont, nice review. At some point, I considered giving it a shot, but then I saw the price and instantly changed my mind. I'm glad I did so; I don't believe it would've worked for me, nor that their "concept" works in general. Repeating phrases ad nauseam without any context, I don't see who can go through that for more than a few days/weeks; it takes out all the enjoyment of learning languages, and ultimately I think that you end up retaining jack nada.
This is a very fair review. I have reservations about Glossika and worry about people spending a lot of money with unrealistic expectations. I was an early fan of Glossika when you could buy and download all the ebooks for a language plus the recordings and then use them as you wished. They then stopped doing this and made you buy an expensive subscription and use the website. I preferred the old system. It was much more versatile. One of my problems with Glossika is actually in the nature of how it was originally made. It has a list of sentences, which started off in American English. These are very general sentences with no cultural references. They were originally used in the teaching of Chinese. The same sentences were then translated en masse into a huge variety of languages (except Romanian). So everything you are saying is not an utterance said naturally by a native speaker but a translation of a sentence first written in English. Sometimes the resulting sentences are absolutely fine. Sometimes they are badly translated by someone who misunderstood the English. Sometimes the translations are technically correct but sound odd because it's just not what a native speaker would say. I share your frustration that the speakers don't seem to point this out but just record it all without question. Or maybe they are not given a chance for input? I would be very surprised if many of the languages are quality checked by an experienced teacher of that language. I am a big fan of using authentic materials and Glossika is far from that.
I'm glad you tried this and not me. I was curious about Glossika, but have generally been happy with the tools I've been using that I didn't feel the need to switch.
I do one of those minority languages most sites don't offer, and even though Glossika offers it for free I just couldn't stick with it there. It was just so...dull.
hej på dej. Although I have Swedish ancestry, that's about my limit. I'm a teacher and I recall watching a video where you explained the benefits of recording 1-1 lessons for later use. However, I cannot subsequently find it. Do you know which one it is? I wish to share it with my students. Tack. :)
Man, I really appreciate the depth and quality you put into your videos. A lot of people don't take the time and effort you clearly do to analyze your video topics in this way. It's really awesome- fortsätt så!
I tried Glossika in their early days (2014 I believe). When I signed up they sent me mp3 files and PDF files of the transcript. I thought it had a lot of potential but the accent was not what I would call authentic and the dialogue did not seem to me how a native would construct the sentences. I also found a lot of mistakes.
Hope you will cover the recording feature in part 2. Repeating and recording the sentences was the only way I used Glossika for. It was good for that, after 5 times I was able to utter the sentences accurately. I was considering paying for it after the trial, but I maxed out of material (C1) during trial, even though I’m not really C1. It’s definitely not worth the $ though.
I must admit I forgot this feature but for me it's not that amazing. It's definitely convenient but I have 0 motivation to shadow random sentences. The Swedish pronunciation wasn't even worth shadowing - I don't want to sound like the person who can't say some of the words. Basically I'd prefer to choose a few lines from a show or something and do that.
12:52 Not Sure How It Is On Other Languages, But I've Noticed On The Welsh Course Usually What It Does Is Show You The Welsh The First Few Times (And Any Times You Get It Wrong), Then Give You Just The Audio, And Sometimes When Reviewing Sentences You've Already Done, It Will Simply Give You The English And Ask You To Remember The Welsh And Type It Out, Ofcourse Showing The Text Or Playing The Audio If You Can't Remember, Which Seems To Make Sense To Me.
I use Glossika. I avoid the placement tests, too. And I get comfortable with the grammar and basic words before I start Glossika. Also, it's likely going to be best for Mandarin and Taiwanese languages, most likely, as they are based in Taiwan. -- In my opinion, this is a brute force cramming software that happens to use an algorithm, not an SRS. The price is definitely too high, though. It'll be the first thing I cut if money gets tight. The 5 sentence thing is how they do their "loading phase" for new sentences. It's hard coded and you can't get around it. They talk extensively about this in their documentation about the system. They count by "repetitions" (ie, the number of times you see a sentence, any sentence, even one you've seen before) not by unique sentence count. I honestly wish this was configurable. Some days I just want to shovel in whole lot of new sentences, and let time and repetition sort everything out later. This model seems to be based on the founder's personal experience learning and teaching languages, not any particular science (but to be honest, he knows A LOT of Languages, so who knows?). When I started out, I used practice mode, but now I avoid it. I prefer the read-and-repeat-out-loud. Honestly, Busuu Arabic supposedly has a lot of weird and awkward grammar/usage, too. Like so much that I was told to avoid it. I think it's a common thing across a lot of start up language companies, that once you get outside their local region the quality of their translations goes down. The bigger players, like Pimsleur and Assimil are more consistent, but they have problems too because they've been around so long, in their older courses that haven't been updated in a while, the language is often is humorously dated or no longer used that way. A lack of consistent quality may just be a thing we have to deal with for the time being, across the board.
But what I am saying about the 5 sentence thing isn't about the reps. I don't care if it shows me a bazillion reps. I'm saying that it shouldn't call that "new sentences". Like, that's Logic 101 if ever I've heard it. New sentences means individual sentences, not reps. They're different things, and even the ridiculously non-intuitive ANKI knows the differences between new cards and reps.
Don't get me started on Glossika. I had a big argument with their team via email that Irish should be free. They claimed that only "endangered languages" are free, and that because Irish is an official language of Ireland, it can't be endangered. I pointed out that it was closer to being extinct than many of the languages on their list of free languages by percentage that speak it regularly and even by raw numbers according to several authoritative sources on the subject, like the Endangered Languages Project and UNESCO. It's one of the only languages in the world where there are no monolingual native speakers. More Irish people speak Polish fluently than Irish. It's absolutely absurd to think that it's not endangered just because it's one of the official languages of Ireland. Obviously, this is due to British colonization and the attempt to eradicate the Irish culture (it was illegal to speak Irish for goodness sake). Anyway, I couldn't use them after this exchange. There are so few Irish resources out there; so little native content. Their program would be a great service, but instead, they're letting some technicality get in the way of helping to preserve a near-dead language.
@@nathanpiazza9644 Although you may technically be describing the situation correctly, can you not see that this person is bringing up a very different issue? Companies shouldn't be forced to give stuff away for free (I made a video about that) but they are giving away languages for free based on their endangered status. If this holds true then that should include Irish.
@@nathanpiazza9644 Imagine putting forth an argument for something and making multiple legitimate points only for some rando to post a sarcastic, mocking comment in a vain attempt to prove their intelligence. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?
@@nathanpiazza9644 Lol. I never said I wanted it for free. I was a paying customer for Japanese. I just noticed that Irish wasn't free and asked them about it. That's when the exchange started. I withdrew my monetary support from them as a company as a moral stand and let them know this was why I cancelled my subscription. Preserving endangered languages is something that matters to me, and they claim it matters to them.
First let me apologize for my rudeness. I may have been reading more into the comment than was said. It is definitely inconsistent and illogical to not include Irish, and I'm willing to bet the people you were emailing were personally sympathetic to your cause. They probably even asked the big boss about it and were shut down, because it seems fairly clear that this company is based on the "genius model" where its founder is in control of everything (not rare, honestly). Saying you unsubscribed to take a moral stand is a bit odd to me, though, because it's not Glossika that put Irish in the position it's in today. They're not causing harm to the Irish language and their purpose as a company is to teach languages first (in fact like all companies their primary concern is making money). Somewhere along the line, a hard definition of which minority languages get to be offered for free must have been set to disqualify official or co-official languages of countries. Otherwise, Kazakh, Uzbek and languages of other ex-soviet republics where Russian language colonialism have decimated the national language would also be candidates, among others, etc. Again I don't agree with the definition, but making much ado about cancelling your subscription in protest because you truly care about preserving endangered languages and because allegedly they don't (ignoring the fact that they clearly do, they're just not doing it in a perfect way), didn't seem logical. Although you are free to do so, and I respect that (especially since it's so damn expensive). It's an interesting story that many people sympathize with. If Glossika were smart, they would read your story and immediately announce that Irish was going free. However, they probably don't work like that.
I use glossika for my japanese. After two months my brain started combining colocations from course and conjugate verbs. Glossika have some mistakes? Yes. It's a big problem? No. Many grammar books and workbooks have a mistakes. My opinion for hard languages like mandarin, japanese or korean 15 mins/day not enough. 1-2 hours. I'm still don't feel fluent myself but I feel the progress. Glossika for lazy guys like me because paid money dont give me be a lazy. Sorry for my English, my mother tongue is Russian and I don't speak English at all.
I like Glossika's goal and head dude. I WISH it was better because the idea that I can go through essentially perfect sentences passively or actively is something that I wish I could do as an exercise. But alas I noticed the same issue with the sentences being wrong or unnatural sometimes where I wondered if it was just a type of sentence you might hear from another part of the country (because a NATIVE SPEAKER is recording it as you mentioned) but after checking with my own native speaking connections nobody would confirm it was a "real" sentence. Bizarre. The moment I find these types of errors in a program, I'm immediately spooked. But wow 8%? That's really discomforting when you are going through 1K, 2K, 3K, 6K sentences. It's of course a challenge to edit a book and make it 100% mistake free but single sentences with native speakers recording, and your entire business pitch is to learn real, native sentences... Glossika's sentences should be near flawless, forget the other site bugs. The Sentences of all things have problems. So ya, this is why I've never really stuck with Glossika when I tried it nor any of those huge free flashcards decks with thousands of sentences because I always come across a sentence in the first 5-10 minutes that's either incorrect (on the L2 side), incorrectly translated, very old fashioned, or just wrong in some way it just poisons the entire water hole and I move on.
I'have been using glossika Dutch for two years. It is a good method if you are willing to use it 20 minutes per day. It's a shame they don't have a Spanish -Dutch. Dutch -Spanish course. Most of their courses are only available in English.
??? They are the same sentences so you just switch the base language and it reads out/displays the sentence first in whatever language you've selected. At one point I was doing Gaelic from Swedish so I'm not quite sure what you mean.
I tried out Glossika during the first lockdown to learn French and I was not a fan, plus way too expensive!! I must prefer Clozemaster, which I would say does relatively the same thing, but much much better.
Has anybody tried some of the more out there languages? Because I literally do not know of a single other functional app that claims to teach Hindi (beyond the level of "hey bro here's a bunch of random-ass hindi flashcards") and I've wanted to learn for forever.
I wouldn't call Hindi "out there" by a long way. It's like the 7th most popular language on Duolingo (although to be fair that's probably mostly Indians who speak one of the other Indian languages). Mango Languages teaches Hindi. Maybe try that.
Did the whole Glossika program for Hindi, pretty helpful. It has some limitations. You need to know the Hindi script, so probably not for a complete beginner. Also, it doesn't handle some grammer concepts well, such as gender in first person sentences. For a female, it may be especially challenging since there is only one native speaker - a male - and you will be practicing the wrong verb conjugation for many of the sentences. I suspect this may be an issue for other languages too. Most of the sentences using the third person are also informal - I suspect Glossika doesn't deal with honorific forms very well, since it is based on English. It doesn't with Hindi. Some translation errors too. So yeah, it has some problems - the gender problem is the big one, I think. However, other than the Teach Yourself series book and audio, you're right. There is not a lot of good stuff out there for Hindi. Still recommend it, but you may to make some modifications to make it work well. I don't feel like it was a waste of time or money, but I recommend trying it first before making that commitment. It is not for everyone.
I've tried to use their Hebrew course and oh boy was it bad. I've had some minimal experience in the language, and the first five words/phrases Glossika suggested to me were "cold", "beautiful", "guy", "weather" and... "how about the evening of 21th this month?" and there's a small time limit for both pre-recorded audio and for recording your tries. That last sentence sounded like someone was trying really hard to speak as fast as they can and it was hilarious! Trying to reproduse the sentence and record it was hell. It got worse after that so I decided to stick with less interactive and frustrating things for language learning.
I have been paying for it but haven't used it much. The price is only justifiable if you are learning like 5+ languages or/and you are a believer of the "shadowing" method.
I find it unlikely that anyone who takes their languages seriously enough to shadow is going to learn five at once, and I would also note that the Swedish readings are not good enough to shadow. The person passes for a "neutral" Swedish accent but a) actually doesn't know how to pronounce some words (I checked this with a few native speakers after I was fairly sure it was wrong or at least unusual) and b) sounds like a robot. In Swedish there is a literally endless source of perfect "rikssvenska" to shadow. It's called audiobooks. It may be worth it for other languages but nothing that's in the top 30 most common Languages to learn.
Hey Lamont, just found this old video of yours. I've never actually used Glossika, but I met the guy who created it at the Polyglot Gathering in Prague this year and from what he told, it sounded like an amazing app (obviously, because everyone needs to sell their own product). Back home I looked at it, but was discouraged by the pricing. Although I was tempted to try one of the free ones, I had to stop myself to not dabble to much in other languages ;-) Long story short: Do you happen to know if the things you criticized here have at least somewhat improved by now and Glossika is actually a valid option, or would you still advice to be careful. Thanks in advance!
My advice is still be careful. There are bad errors in it that make me question its overall quality control. In theory it would work well but so would a lot of things that are significantly more interesting to do.
When I tried glossika (quite a while ago, admittedly -- but after they had already transitioned from mp3/pdf to a website w/ a monthly subscription) it seemed like it'd be something i'd like, since I am a big fan of sentence bank style learning. However, due to the fact that is was organized by sentence structure with no regard for how many unknown words are in the sentence, I really didn't find it useful for a beginner. However, it might have some value for shadowing (or possibly when you have more words). The sentences somehow seem to be even more boring than anki sentence mining, which I'll admit is an impressive feat.
I have tried glossika for several months. It is good for several very specific tasks. As far as I can see, you will never develop fluency through glossika alone. The single biggest downside is the price. It is simply too expensive for what it delivers.
LingQ maybe the closest but Steve Kauffman tends to use other resources in the beginning. If you listen to enough of his content he usually buys a basic reference like teach yourself or a grammar book, or for Russian he did the assimil Russian course.
Can you please go into detail on srs ”wrong way around”. I have been using the “wrong way around” method because no one has told me the “right way”. I have tried to look around what way people uses and why but no one (on youtube) really explains which way is the best for language learning.
I think it's as you see the check out page... but honestly I think as long as you don't just go and pay the "retail" so to speak, it should work out about the same. It should be around $130 AU ($90 US) for a year, or about double that for lifetime. If it's much more than that, something's wrong.
I suspect part of the reason for requiring you to "unlock" content is for the company to retain the mystique that they're the language teaching experts, and that they know the precise order in which to introduce new content. (The idea here being that if you were to rush in and expose yourself to new content willy-nilly, you'd hamper your language learning.) The other part of the reason is probably to keep you paying the monthly fee - give people too much content and gosh, they might learn everything in a month and quit.
It does seem that way. You also can't even review stuff or see sentences or anything if your subscription ends after you've done those things. I mean that's sort of normal but it is frustrating.
The advantages of having tons of languages and sentences is probably directly related to the disadvantages of tons of wrong and awkward sentences. It's a shame, because 5000 well-chosen sentences with high-quality audio would be enough to cover almost all of the vocabulary, sentence structures, and grammar of a language up to the intermediate level, after which learners can partially or completely move on to native materials.
None of this issues existed in the original Glossika system, but they had to make a subscription app and ruin everything. Just get the old audios, the schedule booklet and it will be great.
Not really, no. The OG tier is now exactly the same as the $4 tier, which is explained in the blurb or that tier. But to spend $30 US on Japanese I'd probably pay for Premium of Pod101 which at the 65% off they offer after a while is about $3 a month. Then $5 a month of Language Reactor. Then StoryLearning Japanese, I think there are two courses and although they're normally $400, since they're lifetime then I think it's fair that we count them at the Black Friday prices but over a year. They are $97 each, so let's call that $16.17 a month total. We're up to $24.17 a month, so there is still room for the OG tier if one was so inclined, but either way, you're getting mountains more value than Glossika in all that.
@@daysandwords I’m going to give Jpod101 another look. I remember their service many years ago but they came off as a car salesman but for Japanese language learning. However it seems their offerings have changed, so i’ll check it out for a bit. Thanks for the reminder.
If you can still do it, I would just pay for a month of Jpod101 and then download all the audio during that month. What they offer that most other services don't, is a few hours of conversations with translations, as well as slowed down versions. In stuff like Swedish or Bulgarian, it's a very very useful service.
The old book and audio courses were a lot easier to use, and a good source of beginner input for some difficult to find languages, although of course errors in sentences was still an issue, though minor. I think the new system is aimed at combatting piracy and selling to big companies, but unfortunate that it makes it so much less usable and crazy expensive. I do appreciate them making some rarer languages available for free, but unfortunately those are probably the only ones I’d consider now unless they make some big changes.
'Let me know what you think the "Mysterious Temptress" language that I hinted at in this video is?' From the clue that it is more than 1 syllable, I am guessing Russian or Arabic.
Where is the clue that it is more than one syllable? I can tell you that it is a shorter word than the word "screeched" but longer than the word "Dutch". Actually I'll be telling you Patrons soon anyway, since it ended up being a one week fling. Like an affair to remember haha.
Looks like they used computers not native speakers. And the Native speakers who spoke in the recordings they didn't know the exact meaning of the learner's language.
Nah. It's got to be a 1 syllable language to match the rhythm, so it will always be Days of French n Swedish. Afterall, that's when I started the channel (in the French n Swedish days).
"This bag is heavy" is a staple. I used Glossika for Norwegian and think it worked wonders, so much that I can read Nynorsk better than Bokmål. That said, Finnish provides spoken Finnish audio but you have to use written Finnish to answer, so you better know written Finnish. Lastly, I used Glossika as a supplement for Catalan and found it very helpful, with proper pronunciation, which helped me learn how to pronounced the distinctly Catalan sounds. I have found several errors, but most seemed mismatches and over policing punctuation to country a sentence as correct. @Lamont, I am learning Swedish now and if there are truly 6000 sentences (or more), that's quite an offer. The last thing is that Glossika does not get you to any level in my mind. Saying that someone kicked a few people's asses outside a bar or a few business questions is not enough to say you are a C1. There is so much more vocabulary and situations needed.
Oh yeah, that turned out to be an error, it doesn't have 6000 sentences. It's like 4800 - 5400. I found another language where B2 only had half the sentences of B1 so it maxed out at 3200 when it looked to be going to 6000.
@@daysandwords At the very least, they now have iOS and Android versions in addition to the desktop version. They also allow you to switch prompts between the base language and the target language, so you can go in both directions. Those are both significant upgrades. I care about this program, because it's a modern implementation of the old Berlitz phrase training method that I found so successful and appears to no longer exist.
Ah ok. Well... Yeah, by "no one cares", I mean, not enough people care for me to spend two weeks making a video about it. There are still INSANE amounts of terrible errors, in the Swedish, which I found myself, but also in the other languages, according to people here in the comments. Like I said, I can't believe they could even get a native speaker to read these sentences. Like, as a Swedish LEARNER I can barely get myself to spit out some of the stuff because all the alarm bells are going off.
Oh well, yeah, I did eventually find that to be true on some courses but I mean they don't limit you to half the course. e.g. Estonian has 3000 sentences and Swedish has like 6000 but even if Hokkien is half that again at 1500, that's still quite a lot.
Hokkien was one of the original languages they offered back when Glossika was a pdfs + audio course; Glossika is based in Taiwan and a lot of the methodology is derived from the founder’s experiences studying Chinese languages. All of the original languages had 3000 sentences right out the door, so it can’t have fewer than 3000. That said, I did hear that some of the Hokkien course has awkward “Mandarin-y” phrasing, although I guess it might still be worth it due to the sheer volume of content for such a rarely taught language (especially since it’s not predicated on your knowledge of Mandarin).
It claims that it runs on AI, so I wonder if they recorded words one by one and the sentence recordings are automatically created during the generating process of the sentences.
I actually don't know what the AI claim is getting at but no, the sentences are definitely recorded either in full or in phrase, because the Swedish makes the proper contractions, eg "Den här salladen = denhashaladen..."
Oh my, what to say when language teaching props haven't relied on native speakers! Surely interesting, though! The Swedish translations shown at 7:30 are not correct/good Swedish, we say: När börjar filmen? Hon fick inte gå ut ensam för sina föräldrar (hennes föräldrar lät henne inte gå ut ensam). Du kommer väl inte att komma för sent (du försenar dig väl inte/ är det säkert att du kommer i tid)? Nejdå, jag kommer ju aldrig för sent (å nej, jag försenar mig aldrig). Of course there are many other ways to express the meaning of the English sentences in Swedish, and it always depends on the context how one would say something naturally. But sure is, that the inquiring construction using a positive (negative) statement and a little negated (positive) question hung on, isn't yet a Swedish way of speaking/writing. Maybe it will be common one day, as we get more and more Svenglish? We might use something a bit similar in Swedish, and the little coda could be: eller hur? Always the same: Du hämtar barnen från dagis, eller hur? Hon har redan beställt tågbiljetterna, eller hur? Alla får ta ut sina semesterdagar i juli, eller hur? Det finns många urusla språk-appar, eller hur? In slang, dialects, and pronounced sociolects, there are so many variations, one can't list them here. But, informally, in Stockholm the most common one is simply, "..., va?" BTW For many who translate their thoughts into Swedish from a language with a clear and obligatory future form of the verb ('will' in English), the Swedish constructions are strange, but we do say sentences like this without a cringe: Han kommer säkert att komma för sent igen. Jag kommer inte att komma med till Malmö i helgen. Alla kommer att komma med sina barn till firmans julfest, tomten kommer också att komma dit med klappar, så klart. (In all of these sentences simple present tense is an option, but in none of them would it be correct to use "ska".) It helps that we naturally use "uttals-lättnader" - ways to shorten words and glue them together, for a better flow and speed. For example I myself would say something like: "Ja' kommä int' å komma me' ti' Malmö." But my hubby would say something like: "Ja' kommö 'ntö å komma me' tö Stockholm." (He'd deny it, probably.) It is difficult to write the so called schwa-sound on my key-board - it is the vowel sound of English 'the' or at the end of 'mother' and 'father', without the r). Looking forward to the bashing in part 2! :-D
"Han kommer säkert att komma för sent igen. Jag kommer inte att komma med till Malmö i helgen. Alla kommer att komma med sina barn till firmans julfest, tomten kommer också att komma dit med klappar, så klart. (In all of these sentences simple present tense is an option, but in none of them would it be correct to use "ska".)" 😨I'd probably go for the present tense with those.
@@Komatik_ So would I, when an emphasis is superfluous. But I've noticed that all of these fully correct uses of "kommer att", is the only way to make foreign students let go of saying "ska" in absolutely inappropriate cases. Look at this horrible example of the latter: "Ok! Jag ska komma tillbaka och du ska visa mig, varsågod!" Naturligtvis är detta ett exempel på att någon översatt direkt från ett språk med obligatorisk futurum form, men det kan ju inte den tilltalade svensken veta, som troligen irriterar sig på att få order på det viset. Och det blir inte bättre av svårigheten att översätta "please". Do help me correct this example - and tell us how a Swede would express the whole thing in a fluent and natural way (I myself wouldn't use too many "kommer att", either). P-l-e-a-s-e! :-)
I wasn't impressed with Glossika. I'd love to see a video on how many hours of speaking one needs to speak fluently, in your opinion? I've done about 500 hours in my target language but mostly listening, anki and reading. I only speak once a week. I know Steve recommends speaking for four five hours a day once we start to concentrate on speaking...4 or 5 hours would cost me almost 100 dollars if im speaking to a tutor though 😬
The sentences do seem random, but they're not really. They are slowly introducing you to more complex sentence structures and, indirectly, exposing you to grammer and vocab - and drills it in with tons of repetition. Plus it forces you to speak - a lot. It works. To me, that is motivating. Pimsleur is kind of similar, but more dialogue/conversation driven. Most people would probably enjoy (and so do better with) a program like Pimsleur. I've done both - Glossika is more effective, got to be honest. Of course, you could also "mine" your own sentences, complete with audio, using something like Anki, but... damn, that's a lot of work.
for me, the total fail was lesson 1 asked me to repeat 3 sentences 25 times. after recording dead air 25 times, it said AWESOME. it has no way to tell your responses are good or bad. as long as you complete the lesson it seems to not care. I gave up after getting no sort of feedback.
Honestly I haven't used it since making this review. But nah, it's not really worth it. It's just too dry... unrelated sentences are not really a good idea.
Agreed, I am using it for Catalan. Don't think I would pay to use it, especially not its regular price. But I think it can be a useful part of one's language learning journey especially for the free languages.
@@daysandwords I don't think so. It was a passionate defence of Glossika, but I don't think I was rude. If I overstepped the mark, let me know, but I think I was pretty calm. I'm a huge fan of yours.
@@sandwichbreath0 Yeah so full disclosure, I have deleted comments before (generally if they're painting a picture that is completely untrue and serves some nefarious agenda, like when someone tried to say that I loved a really controversial film that I've never seen) - but I didn't delete anything by this user.
Maybe not a scam, but too grindy. It's basically nothing but paid and worse version of Anki with pre-made decks. I don't think that's the learning language "the most natural way" as they advertise.
I like to learn vocabulary with whole sentences. But Glossika just throws sentences at you and the translation is mostly wrong. Glossika is a lazy way to make money and claiming, that their method is scientifically proven to be effektiv.
HEJ! Hope you enjoyed this review, and stay tuned for part two. Which language apps / programs would you like to see reviewed? Let me know!
Seedlang please!
Speechling and language transfer please
Assimil vs Pimsleur. It's a classic but would love to know your take.
I can't afford patreon, so I'm commenting for the algorithm.
Adding reply comments to further tickle the algorithm's fancy.
@@thomascrownbuerger Indeed! :-)
Al Gorithm? I don't know him but a lot of people don't like him.
@@sharonoddlyenough Haha! Shhh, Aron! Shh! The owners of YT might hear you and we are here on their discretion, we are only guests at this party. :-D Algorithms are their money-makers, the owners only care about our likes and views.
I don't think anyone would confuse this for a sponsored review 😂
I've never personally tried Glossika, and I can't say I'm eager to try it after watching this!
I kinda am actually, though namely for certain lesser languages (that LingQ still hasn't added). Speaking of, I always wanted to love LingQ as much as I love Steve K, but it's never clicked for me. Though nothing really has, so that may be a 'me' problem I should sort out.
@Days of Basketballers 'n' Swedish, looking forward to video part deux.
@@thomascrownbuerger That is one benefit, for sure! I'm lucky in that the languages I'm currently interested in have a plethora of resources available.
@@thomascrownbuerger I love your little addendum! :-) Me, too!
Glossika is a very powerful resource when used right. There are bugs in the system and translation errors but it offers a lot of comprehensible input in Target language. If you know the basic understanding of a language and how the grammar works, Glossika will suit you. Not for extreme beginners since it doesn't have any explanation.
I started a ground zero to learn Italian with Glossier and it is definitely working. I can go at my own pace. I use the internet for some grammar explanation at times.
Glossika used to sell their content as audio courses. They had 3 sets of 1000 sentences for big languages. I found the old audio courses online and listened to English- Chinese and English - Japanese many times on my runs. It was helpful for my getting used to the languages and I am sorry to hear that the current form of Glossika is such an overpriced mess. I was tempted to buy subscription for seeing the transcripts of Japanese sentences but now I hesitate to do it more than before when I already found the high pricing itself quite off putting.
I'm right here with you. I remember when they cut off the box orders and went full subscription model. There wasn't an improvement in the content, they didn't generate new sentences from banks of vocabulary and sentence templates, and the cost was through the roof.
Recently got a month long free trial and I can't think of a reason to use it when I've got Speakly lifetime (thanks Lamont)
Assimil is much better.
Thank you for making this video! I subscribed 2 months ago and I am doing the Mexican Spanish course, I'm about 7000 reps in and I have to admit I made a serious mistake wasting all the money on this. First of all what a snooze fest. i can't keep my concentration after 10 minutes, it's that boring. Then it always seems to hang all the time! I have been a user of numerous apps and programs over the last 2 years and honestly so far the best 3 courses I've used for Spanish so far are Speakly, Wlingua and Fluencia. Keep the the good videos!
Thanks for the review, and I'll be looking forward to part two.
I used Glossika a few years ago to improve my Spanish, and I got some very good results. I will probably use the program again with another language. I agree with most of your complaints, but I know of anything else out there that improved my fluency as rapidly and effectively. There were some bad translations and poorly worded sentences. Not very many, but enough to be annoying.
I used an earlier release, and I know they've added some functions since then, and that might be good or it might not be so good because it makes it more confusing for the user to figure out which functions to use. I did not use the typing mode. I did not use the listening only mode. The only mode that I found very useful was the listen and repeat mode, which I would use sitting in front of the computer. And I did that once a day for 25 minutes.
When I started with Glossika, I was at a level where I had a decent passive vocabulary and could read a magazine and understand most of it, but I was still a very clumsy speaker. I had the knowledge of the language, but not the ability to speak fluently. Working with Glossika. I didn't do the entrance exam. I don't remember if they had one back then. I just jumped in and flagged the sentences as too easy and very quickly I was working with sentences at a more appropriate level. I was doing the listen-and-repeat mode, and I'd be uttering a sentence every 10 seconds or so. They use the metaphor of weight-training, where they count the number of "reps."
I was working with a tutor at the time, but I was pretty busy at work and I hadn't scheduled any classes with her for I guess it was three or four months. And then when I met with her again, all of a sudden I found myself able to speak and I was asking myself, "Where is all this stuff coming from?" I concluded it was all these thousands of reps with sentences in different patterns that I practiced with Glossika.
It can get a little bit boring, and I found that the 25 minutes a day was about right so that I wouldn't get burned out. I will probably use it again with a different langauge when I was at a level where I was reading pretty well but still not at a good speaking level. I would get the monthly subscription (not the yearly) and only use Glossika for a stretch of a few months, as long as it takes to get through the entire course once, and then end the subscription. I would concentrate on the listen-and-repeat mode and pretend that the others don't exist. I would skip over the placement test.
Glosssika certainly has its flaws, but what it does well, it does better than any other product I am aware of.
Your experience mirrors my own with Hindi. And I agree with your conclusion. Flawed, but very effective. Not many good alternatives out there, especially for the language I was studying. Also did the same with the subscription... did the year for $150 (end-of-year special). Definitely the way to go. Honestly, I felt the discounted price was OK, considering the program does actually work pretty well.
I listened to all of Hindi A1, in "listening only mode", and it was quite helpful, despite all the other downsides noted. It's actually really really difficult to get good nontrivial beginner content and hindi, and this really helped me bridge the gap. Ya, it'd be way better if it were actually simple stories instead of individual sentences, but it worked out.
When I was learning Mongolian a few years ago, Glossika was the only place I could find a legitimate Mongolian course. I'm sad that he deleted all his old videos from RUclips. They were such an inspiration to me when I was learning Chinese 10 years ago.
How far have you gotten in Mongolian I hope to learn it one day?
@@jsweebles2150 To be honest, not super far. Resources are very few and far between, or a little outdated. I did do some classes with Nomiin Ger school in UlaanBaatar, which does online classes too, and that was definitely the biggest help. To me, it's the most beautiful language in the world. I really wish it had more attention!
@@nihaokellar180 Yeah I tried a while back I wasn't in a good position already studying Indonesian at the time though. Seems other than the classes you mentioned you pretty much have to pool together resources for it. Once I try again maybe I can use a mix of those and maybe a tutor on Italki. But yeah I agree it is beautiful I just hope to see more to be produced in the coming years. I hope your language journey goes well. As for meeting them HelloTalk is pretty good I think.
Easy Languages has some videos on Mongolian phrases.
@@celinaduguay6484 Thank you for the reccomendation.
Here is how I use the program and find it helpful for pronunciation / prosody practice and to learn new sentence structures and vocabulary.
For learning new sentences:
1st Rep: Listen to Source language (SL) - listen to / read along with target language (TL) - repeat TL
Reps 2 thru 5: Listen SL - respond in TL before audio without pausing program - Chorus TL with audio
For review sentences:
Listen to SL - respond in TL before audio w/o pausing - Chorus TL with audio
Doing this I get to practice recall and production.
However, I agree that it has problems with translation errors and is quite expensive. I was also confused as to why the native speakers didn't sent in these sentences for correction while they were recording the audio. I have also noticed that sometime the audio doesn't match the translation. That may be an example where the native speaker changed the audio translation to match but the written was never updated.
Despite the above issue and the ones you mentioned, I still feel that it can be a good resource for smaller languages. I am currently using it for Scottish Gaelic which is a free language that doesn't really have a good audio course alternative. I don't rely on this program as my only learning source, which is how I am able to notice errors in translation, an occasionally post in different forums question about the sentences in Glossika for clarifications. So I wouldn't recommend it as a primary learning source but if you need a decent source for native audio it can be useful.
I used it for a few months a few years ago, and I remember having a lot of the same complaints. It’s way to expensive for something that only repeats sentences to you when you could just shadow an audiobook or make audio flashcards from your immersion content. It’s behind the times, honestly.
Thank you so much for this! I've been trying to use Glossika on and off for years now. It clearly has "Something" going for it and you CAN learn from using it but it's so expensive, time consuming and boring that it's hard to justify the cost (in money, time & motivation) especially when there are alternatives out there that are free/cheap and far more customizable
Definitely time-consuming- kind of like using Anki. So what alternatives are you referring to?
@@7073cainspeakly, mosalingua, youtube. Assimil, practice make perfect books, graded readers.
You are spot-on about Glossika's dismal quality control performance. With Serbian as my target and German my source language I wearied of submitting feedback notes for inaccurate and inadequate translations. In some instances the translation was the exact opposite of what the target sentence meant. I put all that down to growing pains and Mike Campbell's zeal to pump out as much material and as many languages as quickly as possible.
Thanks for doing this much-needed review of Glossika. I've put in over 140 hours into it in Turkish and how I use it has changed dramatically. My latest way of using it is to listen to the sentence in English, pause, try n say what the corresponding sentence in Turkish is, then resume playback to hear the answer. I feel this has been helping me a bit with my output, and I just see it currently as a tool to help with output. However, I'd only been using it lately cause they sent me a discount. The regular price is hard to justify.
For me it would have to be a very big discount to justify it. I talk about that in the second video.
Any particular reason for Turkish?
@@daysandwords Living in Turkey. Hehe. It's a really tough language for English speakers. You kinda have to wire your brain to think backwards (compared to English) but its grammar is fairly regular/consistent.
I like it - good way to use it. One of the flaws is that Glossika that it is likely going to be used "passively" by the user. The activities it uses to make it more "active," such as typing in "practice mode," are not very good and impractical. It works best in just "listening only" mode. Anything else will just take too long. Just doing "listening only" mode took about 7-8 months to do whole program, A1 to C1. "Practice mode"? No thanks. To do "active" practicing, I copied and pasted the new sentences into a document and tested my ability to recall the sentence, both directions. I used the Goldlist method for this. I think you really do need some form of "active" recall practice to get the sentences to "stick" in your head.
I'm using it now for Swahili. It's not great, admittedly, but it's the best resource I've found for this particular language once you've done Language Transfer to get a foundation. I also use Drops a little, but that has its own (different) limitations.
My personal experience is that Glossika is the Best “program” to learn from if youre too lazy to mine anki sentences or can’t find audio for your language cards to go along with your listening and reading.
Also the placement test is too easy but I was able to test back to the level I wanted.
You you can also submit corrections
I think that is the best way to look at it. Yes, you could create your own deck for free in Anki, SRS and everything, but that will take a lot of work. Essentially you are paying Glossika a fee for to automate that process for you. Up to you to decide if it is worth it.
Just my personal experience, but Glossika was indispensable for me in getting to Japanese fluency (My job demands constant use of the language). I personally enjoy it a lot, but day by day it can definitely get quite boring. However, in sticking with it I made much progress. At the end of the day everybody's experience will be different for sure- and it is definitely pricey. BUT- I tend to use it for more than one language now so I feel like it helps justify the price (in my case) to some extent.
That's fair.
I also wouldn't mind paying if I used it a lot. For me that's Storytel.
3:50 One Major Problem I Have With The Placement Test Is That It's Multiple Choice For The Full Thing, You Could Get A Question Right Simply By Recognising One Word, Which Only Appears In One Of The Answers, Even If You Have No Idea At All What The Rest Of The Sentence Means.
I won't be trying out the subscription system after hearing this review. When I did the Brazilian Portuguese course there were so many errors it wasn't even funny. Things like, the Sun goes around the Earth (in the Portuguese version) when the English clearly said the contrary. That being said, those errors were fixed in a later version of the audio files (pre-subscription format). But I'm not going to use Glossika for a language that I already understand at a C level. Another issue that I have with Glossika, which can also be seen as a benefit, is the same I have with Olly Richard's books: they are the same in every language. This really misses the mark when it comes to being able to teach things that are particular to the target language. And since things are being translated from English all of the target languages end up being taught through the perspective of English. Which is exactly how the translations end up being unidiomatic. It would be so much better to have a system similar to Glossika that starts with the target languages as the base and gives the translations in English. BUT, that is super impractical given the goals of Glossika as a platform back when it was initially created. You just would not be able to go from any language to any of the others. But given the translation issues, I would be seriously cautious about doing that any way as small errors can compound. If a sentence in Italian has a small error and you are learning the same sentence in Portuguese which has a small error, it is now a big error. The two sentences, when taken together, may not even make sense at that point.
By the way, I notice your reviews mostly (all?) focus on apps and websites, but I feel like for an input heavy approach, a lot of the old Book/CD courses like Assimil are sometimes the most direct way to get input and are less restrictive (although I guess some of these have apps now too). Do you think you might cover some of these other methods in the future, or is there a specific reason you haven't focused on them ? I realize a lot of these have already been covered by people like Alexander Argüelles, but since you have a lot of app review videos and stuff on input based learning, it might be interesting if you weighed in on how the current apps compare to older structured book+CD input methods in some form.
I got a B2 High in Spanish when I've only been learning Spanish for 2 months. I was only able to guess the answer because I knew one of the words that was said.
Hi Lamont, nice review. At some point, I considered giving it a shot, but then I saw the price and instantly changed my mind. I'm glad I did so; I don't believe it would've worked for me, nor that their "concept" works in general. Repeating phrases ad nauseam without any context, I don't see who can go through that for more than a few days/weeks; it takes out all the enjoyment of learning languages, and ultimately I think that you end up retaining jack nada.
This is a very fair review. I have reservations about Glossika and worry about people spending a lot of money with unrealistic expectations. I was an early fan of Glossika when you could buy and download all the ebooks for a language plus the recordings and then use them as you wished. They then stopped doing this and made you buy an expensive subscription and use the website. I preferred the old system. It was much more versatile.
One of my problems with Glossika is actually in the nature of how it was originally made. It has a list of sentences, which started off in American English. These are very general sentences with no cultural references. They were originally used in the teaching of Chinese. The same sentences were then translated en masse into a huge variety of languages (except Romanian). So everything you are saying is not an utterance said naturally by a native speaker but a translation of a sentence first written in English. Sometimes the resulting sentences are absolutely fine. Sometimes they are badly translated by someone who misunderstood the English. Sometimes the translations are technically correct but sound odd because it's just not what a native speaker would say. I share your frustration that the speakers don't seem to point this out but just record it all without question. Or maybe they are not given a chance for input? I would be very surprised if many of the languages are quality checked by an experienced teacher of that language. I am a big fan of using authentic materials and Glossika is far from that.
Glossika is rubbish.
I'm glad you tried this and not me. I was curious about Glossika, but have generally been happy with the tools I've been using that I didn't feel the need to switch.
I do one of those minority languages most sites don't offer, and even though Glossika offers it for free I just couldn't stick with it there. It was just so...dull.
hej på dej. Although I have Swedish ancestry, that's about my limit. I'm a teacher and I recall watching a video where you explained the benefits of recording 1-1 lessons for later use. However, I cannot subsequently find it. Do you know which one it is? I wish to share it with my students. Tack. :)
Ah. Saved you the trouble :) It's here ruclips.net/video/uiboR21uFWE/видео.html. Thanks!
Man, I really appreciate the depth and quality you put into your videos. A lot of people don't take the time and effort you clearly do to analyze your video topics in this way. It's really awesome- fortsätt så!
I hope we find out who the Mysterious Temptress is in part 2!
Is it Mongolian???? 😍
@@nathanpiazza9644 It isn't.
I tried Glossika in their early days (2014 I believe). When I signed up they sent me mp3 files and PDF files of the transcript. I thought it had a lot of potential but the accent was not what I would call authentic and the dialogue did not seem to me how a native would construct the sentences. I also found a lot of mistakes.
Hope you will cover the recording feature in part 2. Repeating and recording the sentences was the only way I used Glossika for. It was good for that, after 5 times I was able to utter the sentences accurately. I was considering paying for it after the trial, but I maxed out of material (C1) during trial, even though I’m not really C1. It’s definitely not worth the $ though.
I must admit I forgot this feature but for me it's not that amazing. It's definitely convenient but I have 0 motivation to shadow random sentences. The Swedish pronunciation wasn't even worth shadowing - I don't want to sound like the person who can't say some of the words. Basically I'd prefer to choose a few lines from a show or something and do that.
12:52 Not Sure How It Is On Other Languages, But I've Noticed On The Welsh Course Usually What It Does Is Show You The Welsh The First Few Times (And Any Times You Get It Wrong), Then Give You Just The Audio, And Sometimes When Reviewing Sentences You've Already Done, It Will Simply Give You The English And Ask You To Remember The Welsh And Type It Out, Ofcourse Showing The Text Or Playing The Audio If You Can't Remember, Which Seems To Make Sense To Me.
I use Glossika. I avoid the placement tests, too. And I get comfortable with the grammar and basic words before I start Glossika. Also, it's likely going to be best for Mandarin and Taiwanese languages, most likely, as they are based in Taiwan. -- In my opinion, this is a brute force cramming software that happens to use an algorithm, not an SRS.
The price is definitely too high, though. It'll be the first thing I cut if money gets tight.
The 5 sentence thing is how they do their "loading phase" for new sentences. It's hard coded and you can't get around it. They talk extensively about this in their documentation about the system. They count by "repetitions" (ie, the number of times you see a sentence, any sentence, even one you've seen before) not by unique sentence count.
I honestly wish this was configurable. Some days I just want to shovel in whole lot of new sentences, and let time and repetition sort everything out later. This model seems to be based on the founder's personal experience learning and teaching languages, not any particular science (but to be honest, he knows A LOT of Languages, so who knows?). When I started out, I used practice mode, but now I avoid it. I prefer the read-and-repeat-out-loud.
Honestly, Busuu Arabic supposedly has a lot of weird and awkward grammar/usage, too. Like so much that I was told to avoid it. I think it's a common thing across a lot of start up language companies, that once you get outside their local region the quality of their translations goes down. The bigger players, like Pimsleur and Assimil are more consistent, but they have problems too because they've been around so long, in their older courses that haven't been updated in a while, the language is often is humorously dated or no longer used that way.
A lack of consistent quality may just be a thing we have to deal with for the time being, across the board.
But what I am saying about the 5 sentence thing isn't about the reps. I don't care if it shows me a bazillion reps. I'm saying that it shouldn't call that "new sentences". Like, that's Logic 101 if ever I've heard it. New sentences means individual sentences, not reps. They're different things, and even the ridiculously non-intuitive ANKI knows the differences between new cards and reps.
Don't get me started on Glossika. I had a big argument with their team via email that Irish should be free. They claimed that only "endangered languages" are free, and that because Irish is an official language of Ireland, it can't be endangered. I pointed out that it was closer to being extinct than many of the languages on their list of free languages by percentage that speak it regularly and even by raw numbers according to several authoritative sources on the subject, like the Endangered Languages Project and UNESCO.
It's one of the only languages in the world where there are no monolingual native speakers. More Irish people speak Polish fluently than Irish. It's absolutely absurd to think that it's not endangered just because it's one of the official languages of Ireland. Obviously, this is due to British colonization and the attempt to eradicate the Irish culture (it was illegal to speak Irish for goodness sake).
Anyway, I couldn't use them after this exchange. There are so few Irish resources out there; so little native content. Their program would be a great service, but instead, they're letting some technicality get in the way of helping to preserve a near-dead language.
Don't get me started on Glossika, they wouldn't give me their product for free even after I demanded it for free via email 😤
@@nathanpiazza9644 Although you may technically be describing the situation correctly, can you not see that this person is bringing up a very different issue?
Companies shouldn't be forced to give stuff away for free (I made a video about that) but they are giving away languages for free based on their endangered status. If this holds true then that should include Irish.
@@nathanpiazza9644 Imagine putting forth an argument for something and making multiple legitimate points only for some rando to post a sarcastic, mocking comment in a vain attempt to prove their intelligence. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?
@@nathanpiazza9644 Lol. I never said I wanted it for free. I was a paying customer for Japanese. I just noticed that Irish wasn't free and asked them about it. That's when the exchange started.
I withdrew my monetary support from them as a company as a moral stand and let them know this was why I cancelled my subscription.
Preserving endangered languages is something that matters to me, and they claim it matters to them.
First let me apologize for my rudeness. I may have been reading more into the comment than was said. It is definitely inconsistent and illogical to not include Irish, and I'm willing to bet the people you were emailing were personally sympathetic to your cause. They probably even asked the big boss about it and were shut down, because it seems fairly clear that this company is based on the "genius model" where its founder is in control of everything (not rare, honestly). Saying you unsubscribed to take a moral stand is a bit odd to me, though, because it's not Glossika that put Irish in the position it's in today. They're not causing harm to the Irish language and their purpose as a company is to teach languages first (in fact like all companies their primary concern is making money). Somewhere along the line, a hard definition of which minority languages get to be offered for free must have been set to disqualify official or co-official languages of countries. Otherwise, Kazakh, Uzbek and languages of other ex-soviet republics where Russian language colonialism have decimated the national language would also be candidates, among others, etc. Again I don't agree with the definition, but making much ado about cancelling your subscription in protest because you truly care about preserving endangered languages and because allegedly they don't (ignoring the fact that they clearly do, they're just not doing it in a perfect way), didn't seem logical. Although you are free to do so, and I respect that (especially since it's so damn expensive). It's an interesting story that many people sympathize with. If Glossika were smart, they would read your story and immediately announce that Irish was going free. However, they probably don't work like that.
I always appreciate your reviews. They’re honest and in depth. Thank you 🙏
I use glossika for my japanese. After two months my brain started combining colocations from course and conjugate verbs. Glossika have some mistakes? Yes. It's a big problem? No. Many grammar books and workbooks have a mistakes. My opinion for hard languages like mandarin, japanese or korean 15 mins/day not enough. 1-2 hours. I'm still don't feel fluent myself but I feel the progress. Glossika for lazy guys like me because paid money dont give me be a lazy. Sorry for my English, my mother tongue is Russian and I don't speak English at all.
I like Glossika's goal and head dude. I WISH it was better because the idea that I can go through essentially perfect sentences passively or actively is something that I wish I could do as an exercise. But alas I noticed the same issue with the sentences being wrong or unnatural sometimes where I wondered if it was just a type of sentence you might hear from another part of the country (because a NATIVE SPEAKER is recording it as you mentioned) but after checking with my own native speaking connections nobody would confirm it was a "real" sentence. Bizarre. The moment I find these types of errors in a program, I'm immediately spooked. But wow 8%? That's really discomforting when you are going through 1K, 2K, 3K, 6K sentences. It's of course a challenge to edit a book and make it 100% mistake free but single sentences with native speakers recording, and your entire business pitch is to learn real, native sentences... Glossika's sentences should be near flawless, forget the other site bugs. The Sentences of all things have problems. So ya, this is why I've never really stuck with Glossika when I tried it nor any of those huge free flashcards decks with thousands of sentences because I always come across a sentence in the first 5-10 minutes that's either incorrect (on the L2 side), incorrectly translated, very old fashioned, or just wrong in some way it just poisons the entire water hole and I move on.
I'have been using glossika Dutch for two years. It is a good method if you are willing to use it 20 minutes per day. It's a shame they don't have a Spanish -Dutch. Dutch -Spanish course. Most of their courses are only available in English.
??? They are the same sentences so you just switch the base language and it reads out/displays the sentence first in whatever language you've selected. At one point I was doing Gaelic from Swedish so I'm not quite sure what you mean.
What’s the best Greek apps/resources? Thanks.
I tried out Glossika during the first lockdown to learn French and I was not a fan, plus way too expensive!! I must prefer Clozemaster, which I would say does relatively the same thing, but much much better.
Haha yeah the price is actually amazing. Like it amazes me. I haven't tried Clozemaster for ages, I'll have to give it another go.
Consider doing a review on EWA? It doesn't have a lot of language options, but ive been using it and think it has potential
Has anybody tried some of the more out there languages? Because I literally do not know of a single other functional app that claims to teach Hindi (beyond the level of "hey bro here's a bunch of random-ass hindi flashcards") and I've wanted to learn for forever.
I wouldn't call Hindi "out there" by a long way. It's like the 7th most popular language on Duolingo (although to be fair that's probably mostly Indians who speak one of the other Indian languages). Mango Languages teaches Hindi. Maybe try that.
Did the whole Glossika program for Hindi, pretty helpful. It has some limitations. You need to know the Hindi script, so probably not for a complete beginner. Also, it doesn't handle some grammer concepts well, such as gender in first person sentences. For a female, it may be especially challenging since there is only one native speaker - a male - and you will be practicing the wrong verb conjugation for many of the sentences. I suspect this may be an issue for other languages too. Most of the sentences using the third person are also informal - I suspect Glossika doesn't deal with honorific forms very well, since it is based on English. It doesn't with Hindi. Some translation errors too. So yeah, it has some problems - the gender problem is the big one, I think. However, other than the Teach Yourself series book and audio, you're right. There is not a lot of good stuff out there for Hindi. Still recommend it, but you may to make some modifications to make it work well. I don't feel like it was a waste of time or money, but I recommend trying it first before making that commitment. It is not for everyone.
I've tried to use their Hebrew course and oh boy was it bad. I've had some minimal experience in the language, and the first five words/phrases Glossika suggested to me were "cold", "beautiful", "guy", "weather" and... "how about the evening of 21th this month?" and there's a small time limit for both pre-recorded audio and for recording your tries. That last sentence sounded like someone was trying really hard to speak as fast as they can and it was hilarious! Trying to reproduse the sentence and record it was hell. It got worse after that so I decided to stick with less interactive and frustrating things for language learning.
I have been paying for it but haven't used it much. The price is only justifiable if you are learning like 5+ languages or/and you are a believer of the "shadowing" method.
I find it unlikely that anyone who takes their languages seriously enough to shadow is going to learn five at once, and I would also note that the Swedish readings are not good enough to shadow. The person passes for a "neutral" Swedish accent but a) actually doesn't know how to pronounce some words (I checked this with a few native speakers after I was fairly sure it was wrong or at least unusual) and b) sounds like a robot. In Swedish there is a literally endless source of perfect "rikssvenska" to shadow. It's called audiobooks.
It may be worth it for other languages but nothing that's in the top 30 most common Languages to learn.
Hey Lamont, just found this old video of yours. I've never actually used Glossika, but I met the guy who created it at the Polyglot Gathering in Prague this year and from what he told, it sounded like an amazing app (obviously, because everyone needs to sell their own product). Back home I looked at it, but was discouraged by the pricing. Although I was tempted to try one of the free ones, I had to stop myself to not dabble to much in other languages ;-) Long story short: Do you happen to know if the things you criticized here have at least somewhat improved by now and Glossika is actually a valid option, or would you still advice to be careful. Thanks in advance!
My advice is still be careful. There are bad errors in it that make me question its overall quality control.
In theory it would work well but so would a lot of things that are significantly more interesting to do.
I just discovered your channel i really like it and we seem to have the same humor great
When I tried glossika (quite a while ago, admittedly -- but after they had already transitioned from mp3/pdf to a website w/ a monthly subscription) it seemed like it'd be something i'd like, since I am a big fan of sentence bank style learning. However, due to the fact that is was organized by sentence structure with no regard for how many unknown words are in the sentence, I really didn't find it useful for a beginner. However, it might have some value for shadowing (or possibly when you have more words). The sentences somehow seem to be even more boring than anki sentence mining, which I'll admit is an impressive feat.
I'm excited to see it has Japanese, but that's the only part I'm excited about.
Yeah I wouldn't touch it for any language that common. There's way too many better options.
Lol I love how harsh you are! You just say it like it is!
I have tried glossika for several months. It is good for several very specific tasks. As far as I can see, you will never develop fluency through glossika alone. The single biggest downside is the price. It is simply too expensive for what it delivers.
I am unaware of any app that would deliver fluency used alone. People argue for LingQ but I reject that claim.
LingQ maybe the closest but Steve Kauffman tends to use other resources in the beginning. If you listen to enough of his content he usually buys a basic reference like teach yourself or a grammar book, or for Russian he did the assimil Russian course.
Can you please go into detail on srs ”wrong way around”. I have been using the “wrong way around” method because no one has told me the “right way”. I have tried to look around what way people uses and why but no one (on youtube) really explains which way is the best for language learning.
Check Matt vs Japan's video "The role of SRS in language leaning".
@@daysandwords thank you for helping!
Thanks for the review! Where would I add the Code for Speakly?
I think it's as you see the check out page... but honestly I think as long as you don't just go and pay the "retail" so to speak, it should work out about the same. It should be around $130 AU ($90 US) for a year, or about double that for lifetime. If it's much more than that, something's wrong.
They seem to have disabled codes now. But for me, a year is $129 AU so it should be about $90 US or 80 pounds/euro.
I suspect part of the reason for requiring you to "unlock" content is for the company to retain the mystique that they're the language teaching experts, and that they know the precise order in which to introduce new content. (The idea here being that if you were to rush in and expose yourself to new content willy-nilly, you'd hamper your language learning.) The other part of the reason is probably to keep you paying the monthly fee - give people too much content and gosh, they might learn everything in a month and quit.
It does seem that way.
You also can't even review stuff or see sentences or anything if your subscription ends after you've done those things. I mean that's sort of normal but it is frustrating.
You're extra sassy today, I love it
The advantages of having tons of languages and sentences is probably directly related to the disadvantages of tons of wrong and awkward sentences. It's a shame, because 5000 well-chosen sentences with high-quality audio would be enough to cover almost all of the vocabulary, sentence structures, and grammar of a language up to the intermediate level, after which learners can partially or completely move on to native materials.
Because I've got blue backlighting and it's irresistible 😂
LOL I scored well on the Japanese test BY GUESSWORK and got like 100 sentences total until it said "bye you're done" 😂
None of this issues existed in the original Glossika system, but they had to make a subscription app and ruin everything. Just get the old audios, the schedule booklet and it will be great.
It's way too expensive. This is only worth $2 per month.
I'm just using it for listening practice. Sure, I could just listen to anime but Glossika just is another tool.
For Japanese? I can think of 10 better ways to spend $30 a month on Japanese.
@@daysandwords Like your “The OG Tier” patreon for starters?
Not really, no. The OG tier is now exactly the same as the $4 tier, which is explained in the blurb or that tier.
But to spend $30 US on Japanese I'd probably pay for Premium of Pod101 which at the 65% off they offer after a while is about $3 a month. Then $5 a month of Language Reactor. Then StoryLearning Japanese, I think there are two courses and although they're normally $400, since they're lifetime then I think it's fair that we count them at the Black Friday prices but over a year. They are $97 each, so let's call that $16.17 a month total. We're up to $24.17 a month, so there is still room for the OG tier if one was so inclined, but either way, you're getting mountains more value than Glossika in all that.
@@daysandwords I’m going to give Jpod101 another look. I remember their service many years ago but they came off as a car salesman but for Japanese language learning. However it seems their offerings have changed, so i’ll check it out for a bit. Thanks for the reminder.
If you can still do it, I would just pay for a month of Jpod101 and then download all the audio during that month. What they offer that most other services don't, is a few hours of conversations with translations, as well as slowed down versions. In stuff like Swedish or Bulgarian, it's a very very useful service.
Definitely the blue backlighting lol
I think my Belarusian friends here in the PNW US just say "byela-russian".
Indeed, everything is in the word 'expensive' for me.
Love your videos ☺️
The old book and audio courses were a lot easier to use, and a good source of beginner input for some difficult to find languages, although of course errors in sentences was still an issue, though minor. I think the new system is aimed at combatting piracy and selling to big companies, but unfortunate that it makes it so much less usable and crazy expensive.
I do appreciate them making some rarer languages available for free, but unfortunately those are probably the only ones I’d consider now unless they make some big changes.
'Let me know what you think the "Mysterious Temptress" language that I hinted at in this video is?'
From the clue that it is more than 1 syllable, I am guessing Russian or Arabic.
Where is the clue that it is more than one syllable?
I can tell you that it is a shorter word than the word "screeched" but longer than the word "Dutch". Actually I'll be telling you Patrons soon anyway, since it ended up being a one week fling. Like an affair to remember haha.
@@daysandwords 한국어?
Nup, not Korean. If I was going to learn an Asian language it would probably be Mandarin. (But one does not simply "learn" Mandarin.)
Looks like they used computers not native speakers. And the Native speakers who spoke in the recordings they didn't know the exact meaning of the learner's language.
Thanks for everything sir
I just wish there was a good app that provided Serbo-Croatian …
Mondly has Croatian.
@@huguesdepayens807 thanks!
Will it change to Days Of (language x) 'n Swedish? 😃
Nah. It's got to be a 1 syllable language to match the rhythm, so it will always be Days of French n Swedish. Afterall, that's when I started the channel (in the French n Swedish days).
"This bag is heavy" is a staple. I used Glossika for Norwegian and think it worked wonders, so much that I can read Nynorsk better than Bokmål. That said, Finnish provides spoken Finnish audio but you have to use written Finnish to answer, so you better know written Finnish. Lastly, I used Glossika as a supplement for Catalan and found it very helpful, with proper pronunciation, which helped me learn how to pronounced the distinctly Catalan sounds. I have found several errors, but most seemed mismatches and over policing punctuation to country a sentence as correct.
@Lamont, I am learning Swedish now and if there are truly 6000 sentences (or more), that's quite an offer.
The last thing is that Glossika does not get you to any level in my mind. Saying that someone kicked a few people's asses outside a bar or a few business questions is not enough to say you are a C1. There is so much more vocabulary and situations needed.
Oh yeah, that turned out to be an error, it doesn't have 6000 sentences. It's like 4800 - 5400. I found another language where B2 only had half the sentences of B1 so it maxed out at 3200 when it looked to be going to 6000.
Many of the comments in this video no longer apply. The review should be updated.
Which ones?
I think most of them still do, TBH. But nah, I'm won't be updating the review because in the end, no one cares.
@@daysandwords At the very least, they now have iOS and Android versions in addition to the desktop version. They also allow you to switch prompts between the base language and the target language, so you can go in both directions. Those are both significant upgrades. I care about this program, because it's a modern implementation of the old Berlitz phrase training method that I found so successful and appears to no longer exist.
Ah ok.
Well... Yeah, by "no one cares", I mean, not enough people care for me to spend two weeks making a video about it.
There are still INSANE amounts of terrible errors, in the Swedish, which I found myself, but also in the other languages, according to people here in the comments.
Like I said, I can't believe they could even get a native speaker to read these sentences. Like, as a Swedish LEARNER I can barely get myself to spit out some of the stuff because all the alarm bells are going off.
@@daysandwords I hear you. I’ll try it out and let you know if there’s been any improvement in the two years since your review.
I think those free courses may indeed be half courses.
At least for Hokkien which has significantly less sentences compared to German.
Oh well, yeah, I did eventually find that to be true on some courses but I mean they don't limit you to half the course. e.g. Estonian has 3000 sentences and Swedish has like 6000 but even if Hokkien is half that again at 1500, that's still quite a lot.
Hokkien was one of the original languages they offered back when Glossika was a pdfs + audio course; Glossika is based in Taiwan and a lot of the methodology is derived from the founder’s experiences studying Chinese languages. All of the original languages had 3000 sentences right out the door, so it can’t have fewer than 3000.
That said, I did hear that some of the Hokkien course has awkward “Mandarin-y” phrasing, although I guess it might still be worth it due to the sheer volume of content for such a rarely taught language (especially since it’s not predicated on your knowledge of Mandarin).
Just tested it. Now you can simply switch to a lower level.
Very good vid, thanks you
good video 👍 where are you from?
Australia. 🇦🇺
uzbek represent 😏
It claims that it runs on AI, so I wonder if they recorded words one by one and the sentence recordings are automatically created during the generating process of the sentences.
I actually don't know what the AI claim is getting at but no, the sentences are definitely recorded either in full or in phrase, because the Swedish makes the proper contractions, eg "Den här salladen = denhashaladen..."
The spaced repetition aspect is AI controlled not the audio.
Oh my, what to say when language teaching props haven't relied on native speakers! Surely interesting, though! The Swedish translations shown at 7:30 are not correct/good Swedish, we say: När börjar filmen? Hon fick inte gå ut ensam för sina föräldrar (hennes föräldrar lät henne inte gå ut ensam). Du kommer väl inte att komma för sent (du försenar dig väl inte/ är det säkert att du kommer i tid)? Nejdå, jag kommer ju aldrig för sent (å nej, jag försenar mig aldrig).
Of course there are many other ways to express the meaning of the English sentences in Swedish, and it always depends on the context how one would say something naturally.
But sure is, that the inquiring construction using a positive (negative) statement and a little negated (positive) question hung on, isn't yet a Swedish way of speaking/writing. Maybe it will be common one day, as we get more and more Svenglish?
We might use something a bit similar in Swedish, and the little coda could be: eller hur? Always the same:
Du hämtar barnen från dagis, eller hur?
Hon har redan beställt tågbiljetterna, eller hur?
Alla får ta ut sina semesterdagar i juli, eller hur?
Det finns många urusla språk-appar, eller hur?
In slang, dialects, and pronounced sociolects, there are so many variations, one can't list them here. But, informally, in Stockholm the most common one is simply, "..., va?"
BTW For many who translate their thoughts into Swedish from a language with a clear and obligatory future form of the verb ('will' in English), the Swedish constructions are strange, but we do say sentences like this without a cringe:
Han kommer säkert att komma för sent igen.
Jag kommer inte att komma med till Malmö i helgen.
Alla kommer att komma med sina barn till firmans julfest, tomten kommer också att komma dit med klappar, så klart.
(In all of these sentences simple present tense is an option, but in none of them would it be correct to use "ska".)
It helps that we naturally use "uttals-lättnader" - ways to shorten words and glue them together, for a better flow and speed. For example I myself would say something like:
"Ja' kommä int' å komma me' ti' Malmö." But my hubby would say something like:
"Ja' kommö 'ntö å komma me' tö Stockholm." (He'd deny it, probably.)
It is difficult to write the so called schwa-sound on my key-board - it is the vowel sound of English 'the' or at the end of 'mother' and 'father', without the r).
Looking forward to the bashing in part 2! :-D
"Han kommer säkert att komma för sent igen.
Jag kommer inte att komma med till Malmö i helgen.
Alla kommer att komma med sina barn till firmans julfest, tomten kommer också att komma dit med klappar, så klart.
(In all of these sentences simple present tense is an option, but in none of them would it be correct to use "ska".)"
😨I'd probably go for the present tense with those.
@@Komatik_ So would I, when an emphasis is superfluous. But I've noticed that all of these fully correct uses of "kommer att", is the only way to make foreign students let go of saying "ska" in absolutely inappropriate cases.
Look at this horrible example of the latter: "Ok! Jag ska komma tillbaka och du ska visa mig, varsågod!"
Naturligtvis är detta ett exempel på att någon översatt direkt från ett språk med obligatorisk futurum form, men det kan ju inte den tilltalade svensken veta, som troligen irriterar sig på att få order på det viset. Och det blir inte bättre av svårigheten att översätta "please".
Do help me correct this example - and tell us how a Swede would express the whole thing in a fluent and natural way (I myself wouldn't use too many "kommer att", either). P-l-e-a-s-e! :-)
I wasn't impressed with Glossika. I'd love to see a video on how many hours of speaking one needs to speak fluently, in your opinion? I've done about 500 hours in my target language but mostly listening, anki and reading. I only speak once a week. I know Steve recommends speaking for four five hours a day once we start to concentrate on speaking...4 or 5 hours would cost me almost 100 dollars if im speaking to a tutor though 😬
Join Tandem or Hellotalk link up with natives in your target language. Get partners that want to talk a few times a week.
The concept of it is just so boring to me, lots and lots of sentences that I don't care about!
Yes. I rather mine my own sentences as I read something.
The sentences do seem random, but they're not really. They are slowly introducing you to more complex sentence structures and, indirectly, exposing you to grammer and vocab - and drills it in with tons of repetition. Plus it forces you to speak - a lot. It works. To me, that is motivating. Pimsleur is kind of similar, but more dialogue/conversation driven. Most people would probably enjoy (and so do better with) a program like Pimsleur. I've done both - Glossika is more effective, got to be honest. Of course, you could also "mine" your own sentences, complete with audio, using something like Anki, but... damn, that's a lot of work.
I use Speakly time to time
2:40 my money is on Croatian/Serbian or German 😁
It isn't but in a waaaaaay you are close. In another way you're super far off.
Thanks!
Thank you!
for me, the total fail was lesson 1 asked me to repeat 3 sentences 25 times. after recording dead air 25 times, it said AWESOME. it has no way to tell your responses are good or bad. as long as you complete the lesson it seems to not care. I gave up after getting no sort of feedback.
It's an app already. Has anything changed?
Has anything changed about what?
@@daysandwords on your opinion about the app?
Honestly I haven't used it since making this review.
But nah, it's not really worth it. It's just too dry... unrelated sentences are not really a good idea.
Glossika is alright for the free languages
Yeah and I think worth considering for the obscure NON-free languages like Slovak etc (there's at least 15 that I'd put in that category).
Agreed, I am using it for Catalan. Don't think I would pay to use it, especially not its regular price. But I think it can be a useful part of one's language learning journey especially for the free languages.
I miss the old Glossika.
Glossika is tedious, buggy and expansive. You can get your reps by shadowing real audio content with a real story, not random disconnected sentences.
Hey, my comment seems to have disappeared?
Did it include a link?
@@daysandwords I don't think so. It was a passionate defence of Glossika, but I don't think I was rude. If I overstepped the mark, let me know, but I think I was pretty calm. I'm a huge fan of yours.
@@sandwichbreath0 Yeah so full disclosure, I have deleted comments before (generally if they're painting a picture that is completely untrue and serves some nefarious agenda, like when someone tried to say that I loved a really controversial film that I've never seen) - but I didn't delete anything by this user.
Very interesting review
Maybe not a scam, but too grindy.
It's basically nothing but paid and worse version of Anki with pre-made decks.
I don't think that's the learning language "the most natural way" as they advertise.
I was considering trying Glossika but no more!
I don't understand why you do this
I'm not the hero language learning deserves. But right now I'm the one it needs.
This backing track makes me feel like taking drugs and going to my nearest gay bar :D
Haha, yeah I just had a listen with headphones and realised it is definitely too loud.
@@daysandwords haha it's perfect. Don't think too hard about it. Nobody else does. This was my 3rd video and I'm now a life-long subscriber
I like to learn vocabulary with whole sentences. But Glossika just throws sentences at you and the translation is mostly wrong. Glossika is a lazy way to make money and claiming, that their method is scientifically proven to be effektiv.
Gaelic?
A solid guess, but no! I did buy a book of Scottish Gaelic poetry recently though. If I had infinite time, it would be in my top 10.
Honestly I didn’t care for the whole set up. I actually like Pimsleur better
Yeah I quite like Pimsleur too - wonder if there’s anything else similar
Not that I’m aware of, kind of Michel Thomas isn’t bad
ЖЙ
More like: Glossika - full cringeview
😘
Serbian?
A valiant effort!
But no.
2:26 /r/languagelearning approves.
This website sounds horrible. I can't wait for part two 😃
Tomorrow!