I listened to and attempted to repeat after each of the first 50 GMS-A sentences. The GMS-A sentences are each sentence in order in the pattern of “English (1x), Mandarin (2x), Italian (2x), Cantonese (2x), Spanish (2x).” This means that for each of the 50 sentences, I actually hear 9 recordings with a brief pause in between each sentence. The goal is to repeat the sentence in the target language the 2nd time it’s read aloud. All of this is done while reading along with the sentences in the provided ebook.

The Mandarin, Italian, and Spanish were pretty easy to listen to and repeat along with for the 2nd iteration of each sentence for each language. Though a few of the sentences got me a little tongue tied.

I was surprised by the pronunciation of some of the Mandarin sentences from the Pinyin. Not sure if I just didn’t learn the Pinyin readings correctly in certain circumstances, or whether the oddities were related to the Beijing dialect the course is recorded in. For example, in a sentence like “我​wǒ不​bù饿​è, 但是​dànshì我​wǒ很​hěn渴​kě。”, I would’ve expected that 饿​è would’ve been pronounced more like [ə] than [ɤ].

For the Cantonese sentences, which is the language that I’ve had no experience with before last week, following along in reading was about all I could do. Only on rather short and simple sentences was I successfully able to parrot the 2nd sentence back, but this did get a little easier as the I progressed. I don’t think I succeeded in repeating a sentence somewhat correctly until the 20th something sentence, but it was at least some vague progress. For Cantonese, at the moment, my goal is more just to start hearing the differences in the tones and try to piece out what some words might mean based off the translations.

After doing the first 50 sentences in the GMS-A audio files, I did the first day of the GSR files. I misunderstood this when first starting it and thought it was supposed to be like the GMS-A files, where you repeat after the speaker, but the pauses are no where near long enough for you to be able to successfully do that without speaking a mile a minute! I paused a minute or two into the lesson and went back to read the directions, and found that according to the howto you’re only supposed to listen to the sentences as they’re being played.

Each sentence they introduce in the lesson gets repeated a handful of times throughout the lesson. And for every sentence the recording follows the pattern of “English (1x), Mandarin (1x), Italian (1x), Cantonese (1x), Spanish (1x)”. Apparently, each day they introduce 10 new sentences and repeat a number of the sentences from previous days. This being the first day, there were no older sentences to review, so the file was only 12 minutes long, but should get longer with each subsequent day.

I definitely feel like by the last (4th? 5th?) time each sentence was played for me I started to have a better ear for parsing out the individual words in the sentences.

Total time spent studying with the Glossika audio files today was 41 minutes.