Along the Silk Road

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The new year is upon us so it’s time for a whole slew of new resolutions and goals. It’s the time lots of people dream about what could be and how they’d like their year to go. We all have visions of ourselves and what we want to be. I don’t usually set resolutions because like for most people, they tend more toward dreams than commitments. Anything looks good a year out, but a year is a lot farther away than it might seem, at least when it comes to setting goals that require long commitment.

This year, I’m trying something different. Rather than set a year-long resolution related to the me I want to be, I’m going after a shorter-term and more focused goal.

New Year; New Language.

For background, I’ve been learning Turkish for the last 3 years and I’m at a decent middle intermediate level. I can speak Turkish well enough that my neighbors compliment me, but sometimes it’s a real compliment and sometimes it’s a way of being kind and polite. I wouldn’t say I’m fluent, and I’m certainly still making lots of mistakes all the time. But I can live my life in Turkish pretty well, even if I have to struggle through things sometimes. I’m always trying to improve. I’m about to finish reading my second book in Turkish.

“Learn a new language” used to be on my New Year’s resolutions list for many years back when I was making those lists. I didn’t have a vision or enough motivation to do anything with it. And while “learn a language” seemed like a great goal, I wasn’t fully convinced I could actually do it. Now, I know that I can do it because I’ve already done it, and it turns out, learning a new language can be a lot of fun!

The Goal

Rather than set a normal resolution, I’d rather just take a run at a shorter term goal. In this way I can try to make progress in an area I’m already committed to. I’m treating it as an experiment. How far could I get in learning a new language in 90 days? It’s not exactly a Fluent in 3 Months kind of thing like Benny the Irish Polyglot does. In this sprint, I’m going to use the app Glossika to do something almost no other app or service can do. I’m going to learn Uzbek through Turkish. Apart from getting an Uzbek tutor who doesn’t know English and only has Turkish in common, I don’t know how I could repeat this layering or laddering process.

I doubt anyone out there has “Learn Uzbek” on their resolutions list. But I am excited to take a swing at it myself.

The Plan

I’ll spend the next 90 days focusing on leveling up my Turkish while also starting Uzbek from scratch. Glossika is an app I’ve used pretty extensively so far with Turkish and dabbled just a bit with a few other languages. _In my experience it has been the most efficient and effective app for developing stronger fluency by focusing entirely on sentences. _You see the sentence, hear it in your starting language and then twice in your target language. Then you can type it out, then record yourself saying it back. And you do this in a built in spaced repetition style AI system.

In Glossika, the key metric of progress is a “rep” (think, repetition). You aim for at least 25 reps per day of new sentences (5 new sentences at a time, repeated 5x each) and 25 reps per day of review sentences (done once each). Of course you can do more than this. The founder of Glossika recommends aiming for 3,000-5,000 reps per month to make the most of the process. He says aiming to reach 25,000 reps within 4-5 months will get you to the point of feeling a sense of fluidity or fluency in your target language.

I have used Glossika before, but only as a secondary rather than primary tool for learning a language. I do think it was valuable in that role.

Uzbek

Uzbek is a comparatively very low resourced language. You’re not going to find Uzbek on Duolingo or Babbel. It’s not even on LingQ or Ling. Or Pimsleur. There are some much lesser know apps that offer some Uzbek, but I haven’t seen any I feel compelled enough by to fork out any money.

I want to see how far I can get in 90 days learning Uzbek with my Turkish base, seeing all the sentences in Turkish. This will be helpful in at least 3 ways:

1. I’ll be learning Uzbek sentences.
2. I’ll be hearing the prompts in Turkish every time, so it will be at least somewhat helpful to my Turkish.
3. Since Uzbek and Turkish are so related, this would be the equivalent of a Turkish speaker who knows Spanish using Spanish to learn Italian. Hopefully this will help me get farther faster.

I plan to check in at least weekly with updates on my progress in quantity of reps as well as qualitatively regarding what I am experiences. While I do plan to seek out other Uzbek resources, part of my reasoning is to find and share whatever resources are already out there for a minority language. Hopefully it can encourage others to learn some minority languages. Ideally, I’d love to get some tutor sessions in on iTalki too, but the goal and the plan is only related to Glossika reps.

My Progress So Far

At this point, I’ll share my dashboard view for both Uzbek and Turkish in Glossika. I’ll share updated images weekly as I check back in.

I have used Glossika for Uzbek before, more out of curiosity with the language than anything else. I have completed 114 reps covering 18 sentences.

For comparison, in Turkish I currently have completed 27,896 reps covering 1,953 sentences.

This is as of Jan 1, 2025. So essentially, I am at the very beginning with Uzbek.

Possible Challenges

There are a couple of possible challenges ahead for me.

• Uzbek on Glossika uses the Cyrillic script. In recent years Uzbek has started using a Latin alphabet but many Uzbek websites will have English, Cyrillic Uzbek, and Latin Uzbek. Obviously, that Glossika uses the Cyrillic script will make it a bit more difficult.
• Uzbek is closely related to Turkish, so it could be confusing. I hope that because I am far enough along in Turkish it will actually help me rather than confuse me. I’ve dabbled on Glossika in all the Turkic languages but eventually dropped them because at the time, they were too closely related and would likely be confusing.

The Dream

In taking on this challenge, I have hopes of exploring more Turkic languages and using them to connect with new peoples and cultures Along the Silk Road.

If you want to try this for yourself you can download Glossika and give it a shot. If you do, let me know. I’d love to hear how it goes for you.