mgr.graham Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5965 days ago 15 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Indonesian, Malay
| Message 33 of 47 01 July 2014 at 9:06pm | IP Logged |
Has anyone tried one of Glossika's new courses?
Glossika Languages
Looks like a great lineup.
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Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5857 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 34 of 47 04 July 2014 at 7:42pm | IP Logged |
I wouldn't mind trying it out for Mandarin but i don't quite understand what it is. Are you essentially just paying for a pack of cards with audio? It seems like you also need to use Glossika's personal SRS system? The website is really unclear and i've just spent the last hour or so reading about it online (including this thread on Chinese-Forums) and it's not exactly clear what you get and what to do with it. One thing that kinda pushes me away is that it's focused on Taiwanese Mandarin, it's nice that the resource is out there for Mandarin learners in Taiwan, but i doubt i'll ever spend much time there. It'd also be nice if they specifically mentioned. The courses say "Chinese Mandarin"...
And then the main "slogan" doesn't really make it clear what to expect from the course: "No gimmicks. No games. Pure training all the way to Fluency. Glossika Courses are recommended as a supplement to your current study program." Training all the way to fluency, but used as a supplement?
I'd really appreciate it if anyone could clarify what exactly the "course" comprises.
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mgr.graham Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5965 days ago 15 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Indonesian, Malay
| Message 35 of 47 05 July 2014 at 1:31am | IP Logged |
I agree. The website is a mess, and I've had trouble figuring out exactly how the courses
work. From what I have pieced together, you are essentially paying for 3,000 sentences
read by a native at native speed in the colloquial language. The SRS system drills these
sentences in small batches until you start to pick out words and structures naturally.
Here's a YouTube video of Mike Campbell (the man behind Glossika) demonstrating the
method using the Thai course.
Using Glossika to Learn Thai Day 1
Edited by mgr.graham on 05 July 2014 at 1:32am
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Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5857 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 36 of 47 05 July 2014 at 5:49am | IP Logged |
I think the "SRS system" is a bit misleading, i think really it's just a set of mp3s that you're supposed to listen to like a Pimsleur lesson. At first i thought there was some special software you had to install but after reading what other people had to say it seems like it's all audio/the book (which for some reason is a huge non-OCR'd/non-text PDF, meaning you can't copy/paste from it and the files to download are huge).
Looking at the Thai videos it seems like it would be really frustrating to learn a language as a complete beginner with the course, in particular if you don't have a good grasp on IPA. In the video, you can see Mike correcting Percy's pronunciation a good bit and explaining how certain things should be pronounced. Those aren't in the book, so unless you're also using the course with Mike it seems you're left on your own to figure things out. For a language you've already got a decent grasp on the pronunciation and have a solid base it seems ok. I'm gonna try it with Chinese, i'll share my thoughts once they pass the download on to me (after purchasing it you have to wait for them to send another e-mail with the link to download, it's not immediately available...)
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aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6232 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian
| Message 37 of 47 05 July 2014 at 11:10am | IP Logged |
There's a free sample of the Chinese audio available on iTunes:
Glossika
Chinese
It's stated in the product description that it's not for absolute beginners.
"Recommended as supplementary training to your current studies; some working knowledge required; good for
brushing up or breaking through plateau."
//aloysius
Edited by aloysius on 05 July 2014 at 11:11am
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Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5857 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 38 of 47 06 July 2014 at 1:48pm | IP Logged |
But his Thai course videos show Mike and another student studying Thai from scratch (or from something like .02% and .0001% respectively). And that quote is from the A2+ courses, so i would assume it's not for absolute beginners.
I've been listening to the sentences from the Fluency 1 course and they do seem decent, a bit all over but i can imagine learning them all will help you out quite a bit. I haven't started the actual study program (which involves recording audio, transcription, and some other stuff) so i can't comment on how that works. Though again, they didn't do any of those things in the Thai course videos...
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stmc2 Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6243 days ago 45 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German
| Message 39 of 47 25 July 2014 at 11:56am | IP Logged |
The number of languages on offer has increased hugely in the last few weeks and the
website has changed too. For those interested in various languages from across China, it
is very interesting.
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Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5857 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 40 of 47 28 July 2014 at 4:44am | IP Logged |
Have they actually been released yet, though? I didn't realize that "pre-launch" really meant "pre-order" when i ordered the "pre-launch" release of the Catalan pack. If you're interested, you can scroll to the very bottom of the page to see the list of languages that are available (or soon to be available, i suppose).
I'm currently 300 sentences into the Mandarin Fluency 1 course, has anyone else picked another course up? There are a lot of repeats in the 1000 sentence pack, though, in particular the short "Yes, I am"/"No, I'm not"-style sentences. I wonder how many unique sentences there are per pack? I'm still pretty happy with the course and plan to follow it the whole way through if i can continue setting some time aside for it.
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