Week 001
Week 001 (potentially many weeks of this project so I go with this format
So, the first week just passed and I intend to give a small recap as well as more in dept reporting on what I have learned and experienced.
Recap:
- Easy to do Glossika on the fly
- Starting a completely different language is hard without certain key words like I, you, is etc.
- Already great improvement in pronunciation of certain languages.
So, after one week of starting the project with the most pretentious title only rivaled by celebrity self-praise I have noticed certain things that has been different with how I have been learning languages before. Thus far I have only good things to say about Glossika. That does not mean there is no room for improvement. I have one things thus far (female and male voice option)
Tedious?
One of my biggest concern when starting with Glossika was that it would be tedious to be repeating the same sentences in the same languages over and over again. Thus far I have been proven wrong. Although it can be very boring to hear the English sentences spoken a billion times I make sure that languages I have a certain knowledge of have other translations than English. For example does my Italian deck have a Dutch translation, and my Korean deck has a Chinese translation. I still make sure that my "main" deck (for the moment Japanese) has English so that I can know the original sentence in case the translations differ to the point of not being recognizable. This way to do the decks makes them all interesting as I cannot "rest" at any point in time.
Pronunciation
This will probably come as no surprise to anyone but repeating sentences spoken by a native speaker greatly helps with pronunciation. I tried to say a Greek sentence to my friend the other day and after just a few sessions he thought my pronunciation was quite ok. Still when I try to say words I don't know I fail miserably.
Starting a language from scratch
I wanted to see if I could recognize the meaning of certain words in certain languages just by listening to sentences over and over again. This has thus far seemed to be impossible but I have still kept repeating them every time I have heard them. When I tried to use google translate in conjunction with these languages today the results were much better than I could ever imagine. By checking the main words in languages I could not understand much in I was suddenly able to understand the sentences I had been repeating this last week.
I thought that I would have had to get a basic word list or grammar for languages that I did not have any previous experience with before like Vietnamese and Arabic but it seems that using google translate will bring the basic knowledge needed to understand basic sentences.
Too many languages at the same time
All though Glossika is very good for learning multiple languages at the same time, this might lead to a difficulty in choosing what to study at what time. The AI of Glossika seems very good and not having to prepare what to study is a blessing. Still, I notice that I can sometime use more time than needed to decide what I should study at a certain time. I hope this will cease as I use the program more.
Need for male/female option
This is so far the only complaint, and it is not really a complaint as it is a wish. For certain languages it is very important weather the speaker is male or female. In the Icelandic course, the voice-over is male, which makes it very easy to follow for me. The same cannot be said for Russian, which has a female voice-over. Because of this the conjunctions that I should use and she should use do not always overlap. It would be great to see an option to choose the gender of the voice-over in the future for languages that are put a great emphasis on gender (Slavic, Romance, Icelandic etc)
Now over to the results
Thus far I have not felt a great deal of improvement in any language apart from the fact that I am much more comfortable using certain words that I have repeated a lot this week.
Disclaimer:
First post is bad post (will hopefully get the hang of writing good posts)
So, the first week just passed and I intend to give a small recap as well as more in dept reporting on what I have learned and experienced.
Recap:
- Easy to do Glossika on the fly
- Starting a completely different language is hard without certain key words like I, you, is etc.
- Already great improvement in pronunciation of certain languages.
So, after one week of starting the project with the most pretentious title only rivaled by celebrity self-praise I have noticed certain things that has been different with how I have been learning languages before. Thus far I have only good things to say about Glossika. That does not mean there is no room for improvement. I have one things thus far (female and male voice option)
Tedious?
One of my biggest concern when starting with Glossika was that it would be tedious to be repeating the same sentences in the same languages over and over again. Thus far I have been proven wrong. Although it can be very boring to hear the English sentences spoken a billion times I make sure that languages I have a certain knowledge of have other translations than English. For example does my Italian deck have a Dutch translation, and my Korean deck has a Chinese translation. I still make sure that my "main" deck (for the moment Japanese) has English so that I can know the original sentence in case the translations differ to the point of not being recognizable. This way to do the decks makes them all interesting as I cannot "rest" at any point in time.
Pronunciation
This will probably come as no surprise to anyone but repeating sentences spoken by a native speaker greatly helps with pronunciation. I tried to say a Greek sentence to my friend the other day and after just a few sessions he thought my pronunciation was quite ok. Still when I try to say words I don't know I fail miserably.
Starting a language from scratch
I wanted to see if I could recognize the meaning of certain words in certain languages just by listening to sentences over and over again. This has thus far seemed to be impossible but I have still kept repeating them every time I have heard them. When I tried to use google translate in conjunction with these languages today the results were much better than I could ever imagine. By checking the main words in languages I could not understand much in I was suddenly able to understand the sentences I had been repeating this last week.
I thought that I would have had to get a basic word list or grammar for languages that I did not have any previous experience with before like Vietnamese and Arabic but it seems that using google translate will bring the basic knowledge needed to understand basic sentences.
Too many languages at the same time
All though Glossika is very good for learning multiple languages at the same time, this might lead to a difficulty in choosing what to study at what time. The AI of Glossika seems very good and not having to prepare what to study is a blessing. Still, I notice that I can sometime use more time than needed to decide what I should study at a certain time. I hope this will cease as I use the program more.
Need for male/female option
This is so far the only complaint, and it is not really a complaint as it is a wish. For certain languages it is very important weather the speaker is male or female. In the Icelandic course, the voice-over is male, which makes it very easy to follow for me. The same cannot be said for Russian, which has a female voice-over. Because of this the conjunctions that I should use and she should use do not always overlap. It would be great to see an option to choose the gender of the voice-over in the future for languages that are put a great emphasis on gender (Slavic, Romance, Icelandic etc)
Now over to the results
Thus far I have not felt a great deal of improvement in any language apart from the fact that I am much more comfortable using certain words that I have repeated a lot this week.
Disclaimer:
First post is bad post (will hopefully get the hang of writing good posts)
Kommentarer
Legg inn en kommentar