Along the Silk Road

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It has been 2 weeks now since I started my 90 Day Uzbek Challenge using Glossika. You can find my Week 1 post here. Each week I’m using Glossika to learn Uzbek from scratch. My 90 Day Challenge will take me through the end of March 2025. It seemed like too perfect of a timeframe not to go for it!

Glossika Progress

By my count I’m just short of 800 reps this week across new sentences and practice reps. I’ve stayed on top of doing all of my reviews each day, and some days I’ve done all of my reviews twice over. I feel good about where I am in listening familiarity to the sentences I’ve done so far. I would like to be higher on reps for the week than I am, however. I would like to steadily increase my daily reps a bit moving forward. They say aiming for 3,000 per week is a great goal. I’m getting there, I guess!

Things I’m Noticing

• I need to set my daily achievement goal a bit higher for the week ahead. For my final day in the last week I nudged it up from 25 new reps and 25 practice reps to 50 and 100 respectively. This should help me keep a solid baseline of minimum reps for the week.
• I found an Uzbek translation of the Bible on Bible.com (or the YouVersion app) and listened to a couple of chapters. I was surprised by how much I could understand in the context of something I was already familiar with. It was encouraging to hear extended audio in Uzbek and in a somewhat comprehensible input sort of format.
• I do like the way Glossika packages their language learning process into bite-sized bits and makes it easy to pick up and put down. I find that I’m more likely to open it and do 1 or 3 or 7 reps while I’m walking down the stairs in my building or walking up the block.
• I would love to have an audio track of sentences I can just listen to without needed to respond for when I can’t stop to record my own voice in each rep.

The Week Ahead

I started sprinkling in some practice reps in full practice mode, where I needed to type in the sentences in the Cyrillic script. It is very “hunt-and-peck” for me using that input, but a bit at a time, I think it could be helpful. Maybe I’ll try that more in the coming weeks. For now, I’m having a good time and I feel like I’m making some progress at a very base level.

If you want to join in on the challenge or try your own version of it, you should start today, then let me know how it goes in the comments below.