A Review of Glossika: Spaced Repetition System

There’s a method of learning languages that grew in popularity thanks to the blog All Japanese All the Time (AJATT) that places learning grammar and vocabulary through sentences and context rather than through the puzzle-like sequences found in most language textbooks.

Here’s how it works:

1. Learn the writing. Kana, Kanji, Cyrillic, Greek, hieroglyphs, etc.

2. Start with basic sentences and work your way up.

3. At around 10,000 unique sentences, you should be “fluent” in a language.

This really isn’t a bad way to learn languages. It falls into the input method, which emphasizes language acquisition through reading and listening instead of intensive grammar study and vocab memorization. I’m not going to knock it, as I have a real fondness for it.

How does this tie into Glossika? Glossika is a website that purports to teach a language (minus the script) entirely through sentences. They purport that if you simply listen, you’ll pick up the language.

It used to come as mp3s and have a book to go along with it, but now it’s entirely online and the sentences are presented in a slightly different order than they used to be. I’m going to be reviewing the new version, of course.

What’s Great About It?

Having sentences that increase in vocabulary and complexity of grammar is amazing! Instead of struggling through books or grabbing sentences from TV shows and movies to clumsily shove into a spaced repetition system (SRS) like Anki, all the sentences you need to be proficient in conversation are right in one place. That cuts down on a lot of time!

It also helps to be able to hear a native speaker say the sentences so the student can learn to mimic things like stresses, pitch accents, or tones, depending on the language. These things trip up a lot of students and make their speech sound clumsy even if they’re using correct grammar and obviously have a fairly expansive vocabulary.

I also like the large variety of languages, although some of the languages are currently only for certain dialects. Finnish, for example, is only taught in a southwestern dialect and the Norwegian dialect of Nynorsk is the only one taught. That’s a bit of a shame, but that’s not to say that other dialects and languages won’t be introduced in the future. Indeed, the site appears to be growing and encouraging people to work on adding their own languages and dialects.

Oh, and you can learn Gaelic for free, which is great.

I suppose that should bring me to pricing. For either the monthly fee of $30 or the annual fee of $299.88, you get access to all languages. For someone like me, a polyglot, that’s an amazing deal. However, for someone who just wants to learn one language for travel, immigration, or just because, it might feel a bit pricey. However, many other courses charge way more than that for just one language.

What Stops Me From Recommending it for Beginners?

I believe Glossika can be fixed with just a simple change: some grammar and vocab explanations.

The big downside is that it throws you into sentences with no explanation at all. That’s not all bad if you’re learning a language similar to your own, but if a language uses grammar that’s quite a bit different from your own and/or vocabulary that’s used regularly in their language but has no real translation in yours, you’ll run into a headache. A headache, mind you, that could be eliminated with the simple change of dong what apps like Duolingo or programs like Assimil do and providing basic explanations of new grammar or tricky vocabulary.

In Japanese, for example, two sentences were presented almost back-to-back, both of which used the verb “to visit” in them. However, the word used was different in each sentence, so the beginner learner would be unsure (provided they even knew which word meant ‘visit’) of what the difference was.

As it is, it’s a great resource for building vocab, but I suggest you have at least an intermediate grasp of grammar before embarking. Either that or make sure you have a good grammar book handy that you can reference and a dictionary to look up the new vocabulary. Do that and Glossika is far more comprehensible.