I’ve definitely gotten into a groove in doing my Glossika lessons at this point, having made it to day 60 without having missed a day. Not so say that I’ve been perfect so far, there have been two days where I ran out of time and had started my lesson, but never got around to finishing the last 10 minutes or so. I don’t think this is a big deal for the course, since there’s a large quantity of repetition in the GSR files. Not ideal, but not terrible either.

My current weekday schedule looks like this:

  • GSR (10 minutes) on the walk to the train station
  • 1/2 of my Anki on the train into San Francisco
  • GSR (30 minutes) on the walk from the train station to my office
  • Normal work day
  • GSR (rest of, up to 30 minutes) on the walk from my office to the train station
  • Rest of my Anki on the train home
  • Music or a podcast in one of the languages I’m studying on the walk home from the train

The days where I haven’t had the chance to finish the GSR files have been when something has changed my schedule so that I’m not walking home in the evening.

This schedule is working out quite well for me, as it allows me to get all of the mandatory studying for Glossika done during time that would otherwise have probably just been wasted playing on my phone or just listening to some music.

Besides my minor complaint about multiple translations, which I mentioned in the Days 18-44 post, I do have one other complaint now, which is specifically about the triangulation course with 4 languages: It’s too slow.

To be fair to Glossika, this is completely my fault, since I’m trying to learn 4 languages simultaneously which should be a massive time sink. I’m finding the course to be productive, but I’d prefer if it were faster paced. As I discussed when I first received the course, Glossika does have multiple schedules depending on your language background and how much time you have to devote. I chose the simplest schedule, because the time cost for the 5 month schedule was higher than I was able to devote.

I’ve been debating lately that knowing what I know now, if I had to make the choice again between doing a single language course in a 4 or 5 month schedule spending 60-90 minutes a day, or doing 4 languages at the same time in a 9 month schedule for the same amount of time each day, if I’d make the same choice. Even if I’m actually being more productive this way, I think I’d feel like I was accomplishing more by doing a single language in a shorter time scale.

That being said, I still don’t have the time to devote to doing the 5 month program with the triangulation course, but I do have sporadic amounts of time that I could spend progressing my language skills in Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, and Cantonese further than just what Glossika is doing for me on the daily schedule.

To this effect, I’ve picked up some new Spanish books to practice my reading skills (including one that’s actually about China, which is kind of liking doing double duty here: Cuando los chinos hablan: Historias reales para entender a la futura potencia del mundo).

I also plan on spending more time studying 汉hàn子zi (i.e. Chinese characters), which will allow me to start reading more things in Mandarin to practice that language better as well and hopefully improve my Mandarin vocabulary, which is rather limited at this point.