Since the last post, I’ve done GSR files 14, 15, 16, & 17, as well as GMS-A sentences 151-200. You might remember me discussing when the last GMS-A file was due, that I wasn’t going to do these files anymore (post), but I’ve changed my mind in the last few days.

A few days ago, I realized that I wasn’t getting much out of including the sentences in Anki anymore. One of the main benefits of Anki, is being able to effectively memorize anything. Glossika seems to more have the intent of large quantity of meaningful, repeated exposure, with the goal that you will internalize content, but not memorize the sentences that it’s providing. These two approaches actually don’t interfere with each other, and doing the daily sentences in Anki in addition to the GSR files can’t hurt anything.

But it is a waste of time. It takes way more time and effort each day to memorize 3,000 sentences than it does to understand and internalize them, which is probably way more important. So in addition to spending somewhere between 40-50 minutes doing the GSR files, I was also spending at minimum 45 minutes studying the sentences in Anki. But what I was finding was that the GSR files were more effective means of me understanding the components in a sentence and how the sentences relate to each other.

I don’t think that the sentence that I’ve already studied in Anki were a waste of time, especially for Italian and Cantonese. These two languages are the ones that I’ve had the least exposure in trying to listening to. And the additional exposure in Anki with the text alongside the audio was very useful in me beginning to map sounds to individual words and begin to understand how the sentences were being put together. However, I probably could’ve gotten this same benefit from simply repeating the early GMS-A files a few more times.

So for the time being I’ll continue to review the sentences I’ve already introduced in Anki, but won’t have any new cards for the foreseeable future.

Total time spent with Glossika today: 50 minutes.
Total time spent with Glossika: 768 minutes (~12.8 hours).