On Friday, Glossika updated their self-studying schedule guide. Among other things, one of the things that they updated was giving a better explanation as to how they intend the daily GSR files to be used. Turns out that my statement in Day 1 was incorrect, they do intend for you to repeat after each sentence for each language. They’ve made this explicit in their instructions now, where as before it was kind of vague and seemed to indicate you were just to listen.

Theoretically, I think that the idea of repeating after each sentence makes much more sense. This gives you a chance to practice rolling each sentence off your tongue, and helps train your mouth to kind of go with the flow for each language.

Practically, I think that they don’t give enough time to repeat after them for the sentences. For example, the sentence in English “Where’s your mother? Is she at home?” (sentence #63) is translated into Mandarin as “ní mǔqīn zài nǎr? tā zàijiā mā?” and takes the speaker on the recording 3.4 seconds to say. There is then a period of only 1 seconds before the Italian recording starts. The silence between speakers on the recording seems to consistently be 1 second long, regardless of the duration of the spoken sentence. Which makes repeating after difficult for the longer sentences without having your finger on the pause button, which is something they explicitly state you should try not to do.

Of course, I don’t follow directions well, so I tried that…and it didn’t work out well. Mostly because I got bored and it stretched the time out way too long. And honestly? It didn’t actually help me with repeating it that well. Generally, either the sentence was short enough that I could spit it out during the pause, or the sentence was too long for me to keep in my head and I was repeating it incorrectly anyways.

So for the last 3 days, since I got the updated information, I’ve been trying to repeat after the sentence in the pause provided. This gives a sense of rushed urgency and does seem to have some benefit for learning. For the longer sentences, I try to select a section of it I want to repeat after each time so that I’m not still talking when the next language starts.

I find that this works best when I don’t overthink it too much, which means that I should be attempting to repeat the sentences while doing something slightly distracting. Tetris (or Quadrapassel, since I’m running gnome right now) is good for this, as it’s just distracting enough to keep me from getting distracted, but simple enough that I can still think about the sentences enough to repeat them.

Day 11 was also the 3rd time I was supposed to do the GMS-A files, which is where I read along with the sentences in the pdf and attempt to repeat. Most of the way through this (20 out of 30 minutes), I decided that this was pointless. It definitely isn’t pointless in general, if you’re strictly following Glossika’s method, but since I’m introducing all of the sentences with their audio via Anki, I’ve already had the type of exposure that the GMS-A files are attempting to give me. So, at least while I’m still introducing the sentences via Anki (which I might stop doing in the future, who knows), I’m not going to bother doing the GMS-A files.

Information for Day 11 only (not including time spent with sentences via Anki):

Total time spent with Glossika today: 61 minutes.
Total time spent with Glossika: 462 minutes (~7.7 hours).