Along the Silk Road

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It has been a week since I started my 90 Day Uzbek Challenge. If you haven’t read that initial post, take a couple of minutes to go do that. Today, I’m checking in with my first weekly progress report to share how it has gone and what I’m learning from the process of using primarily Glossika to learn a new language (other than Uzbek sentences).

Glossika Progress

The key indicator metric for Glossika is “reps” (as in repetitions). I hope to maintain an ongoing streak every day throughout this challenge. Consistency is a major factor. But I’m most concerned with building up a good amount of reps week by week.

This week I kept a full streak. The streaks are indicated by the green and blue icons in bottom of the image. Green represents my streak of days where I completed my “new sentences” goal and blue represents my streak of days where I completed my “reviews” goal. I have each set at the minimum of 25 reps. I can always do more, but I want to accomplish at least 25 of each to hit my goals each day. I am currently at an 8 day streak because I pulled out my phone and did my daily minimum reps on the way to the cafe where I’m currently writing this.

As of today, I have completed just over 1,000 reps and I have covered 99 sentences. This week I have usually only been doing 1-2 sets of 5 new sentences per day and working through all my review sentences to keep from building up a backlog of items. I find I’m not getting as familiar as I would like to be if I don’t hit my reviews pretty consistently. Early in the week I didn’t even have enough reviews built up to make the daily goal so I reviewed every sentence multiple times. I’ll be curious to see how this may change as time goes by and I have more total sentences and more review items popping up. I haven’t ever really kept up very well with reviews on Glossika, so we’ll see if I can get a better sense out of it this time.

Things I’m Noticing

• Glossika uses the Cyrillic script for Uzbek, so I have to slow down a bit to try to make better sense of the sentence. Little by little I’m trying to focus more on the actual sentence and not look directly at the romanization or IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). I’m honestly just not that worried about this – I’m noticing that this difficulty makes it a little bit more challenging to remember some of the words as quickly since they don’t process in my mind as easily as they might if they were in the Latin script.
• Some of the sentences pop up in my mind throughout the day, despite the fact that I’m taking an easy approach. I’m only aiming to get 50-100 reps per day for now. When the sentences come to mind, I’m repeating them out loud, even if under my breath. That has been an encouraging thing. Even if I only have the sounds of the sentence come to mind (and not the meaning) it still means there’s something getting in. Most of the time though, I’m remembering the meaning too. And when I can, I try to apply the Uzbek sentence in context: When we’re about to leave the house, I look at my children and ask, “Tayyormisiz?” (“Are you ready?”) and of course they look back at me with a strange look. They weren’t ready. This part is just for me. It’s helping me get some things more stuck in my mind. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.
• The similarities between Turkish and Uzbek are helping rather than hindering me at this point. I don’t know if I’ll feel the same way later on, but it has been nice to implicitly understand possessive or dative or some pronouns because of my familiarity with Turkish.
• I have essentially only used Glossika this week. I visited a small bookstore months ago looking for interesting language books and was chatting with the guy running the shop. I had found a pocket Uzbek to Turkish phrase book I wanted to buy, but he wouldn’t let me buy it. He insisted on giving it to me as a gift. I wasn’t planning to learn Uzbek when I bought it, but I am always on the lookout for interesting language books, especially connecting Turkish with other languages I’m interested in. I glanced through that book a bit this week, but I don’t really count that. I will however, share more about what role this little book may or may not play later on in the challenge. Maybe I can make a some use of it. It is strange to go from Cyrillic script + audio to text-only and in Latin script.
• This actually took very little time in my day or my week. When I started learning Turkish, spent a really significant amount of time on it daily and weekly. It was a necessary life skill for living in Turkey. And I had need for it in a way that I don’t with Uzbek. I suppose I’m doing this challenge in the way that most people tend to approach language learning – a bit every day. I hope to build a habit of working on my new language while also slowly building up some familiarity and a small pile of useful sentences over the next 90 days.

The Week Ahead

In the coming week I’d like to get a bit closer to the recommended 3,000 reps for the week. I’m curious to see how that will feel in the context of a new language. When I first discovered Glossika, I was probably between A1-A2 levels. I could communicate in simple ways and I understood some basic grammar patterns and could use them in daily conversation. So racking up reps on Glossika felt like it helped me grease the gears, so to speak. This time, I’m starting from scratch. I feel like I could take on too much and not really get the value out of it because I’m trying to juggle too many unfamiliar words and sentences and even sounds. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I’m going to pick up the intensity with time and see what happens.

And so, that’s it for this week’s check-in. Let me know in the comments below what languages you’ve tried learning and if you’re working on one now. I’m excited to press on into week 2. I hope you’ll keep learning along with me.