I must admit that I was quite skeptical when discovering yesterday that the GSR were only meant to be listened to. I mean, how effective can something be if you’re not actively trying to do something with it? Day 2 says surprisingly so.

Day’s 2 lesson on the 9 month “relaxed” mode is only a 24 minute long GSR file reviewing the 10 sentences introduced in yesterday’s GSR file and introducing 10 new ones. Any my head hurts already. I’ve long associated a rather pleasant, specific kind of headache with learning a language. Normally it comes either when spending an hour or two diving into a new language or spending several hours working with or speaking a language I’m more comfortable in. But 25 minutes? That’s a rather short amount of time to have overloaded my brain already

I’m unable to say whether it’s the attempting to understand a novel language like Cantonese by just being thrown into listening to sentence translations, or whether it’s jumbling Mandarin, Italian, Cantonese, and Spanish all together that’s causing this, but either way it’s causing my brain to work overtime. My understanding is that each new GSR file adds 10 new sentences and reviews the sentences from the previous 4 days, so if day 2 with only 20 sentences was this difficult to get through mentally, I’m excited to see what the coming days bring.

Some specific observations from today’s lesson is I have to spend a lot more mental energy attempting to parse Cantonese then any of the others, and since the lessons are always Cantonese followed by Spanish, there were quite a few sentences where I was so distracted by the Cantonese that I almost missed the Spanish. I’d assumed that I’d have an easier time with Spanish than Italian, since I have far more experience with Spanish over the years than Italian. But with the distraction of Cantonese, I’m having a harder time focusing on the Spanish. I imagine that given a few weeks, I’ll be more comfortable with Cantonese and get into a better groove, but only time will tell.

My gut reaction so far is that Glossika is very useful for the languages where I already have a bit of experience (Mandarin, Italian, Spanish), since for those I’m already parsing out words I might now have known and able to follow along pretty well. I might end up having to do some extra practice specifically with Cantonese, such as some vocab and transcription training, to make sure that I get as much out of the program for that language as possible.

Total time spent studying with the Glossika audio files today was 24 minutes.