Along the Silk Road

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Welcome back to another weekly check-in on my 90-Day Uzbek Challenge using mostly Glossika to see how much I can learn. If you want to get a feel for the challenge, have a look at my series intro post here. It occurred to me this week when I was checking my streak that I hit 4 weeks straight. Beyond that one time where I “got to 50% fluency in German with Duolingo,” I haven’t kept long streaks with any app. So it’s nice to see this as a useful and manageable habit I’m building.

Glossika Progress

This week I continued my daily streak and ended up completing 1,075 reps for a total of 4,335 reps completed. Each week I think, “I should have done more reps this week than I actually did.” But on the whole, I think I have a good rhythm going. The daily load of reps can’t be completed in 5-10min alone, but it doesn’t take an hour either. And at the rate I’m going, I am tracking with being somewhere in the neighborhood of the 15,000 reps in 3 months that the founder suggests aiming for. That’s really my only metric I’m thinking about beyond simply my daily rep progress. I will be curious to see how it feels when I get to the end of the challenge.

Other Goal Progress

Last week I mentioned that I wanted to take a swing at a couple of other things. I didn’t make it to the Uzbek restaurant this time, and so I didn’t make my list of key phrases to be ready to use. I did however take another online lesson on iTalki. I’m really enjoying that process and I have another one scheduled for this weekend. I picked up a package of 5 lessons right after completing my first lesson a couple of weeks back. I ended up getting to use a couple of the phrases with my tutor anyway. These goals will be background ideas I hold on to.

Things I’m Noticing

• This week, a friend heard that I was learning a bit of Uzbek and asked me to say something so they could hear how it sounds. I was able to say a couple of simple sentences. It’s always gratifying to be able to use anything you’ve learned in a new language. Even the smallest bits like that.
• One of Glossika’s major strengths is how its singular purpose is to give you sentences and make you say them (and write them, if you choose). It is simple and direct and clear. One slight downside is that the system is fully on rails – meaning that you can only use the sentences they provide. So while I’m becoming familiar with lots of sentences little by little (284 of them to be specific at the time of writing), most of them are not in any way directly related to useful things in my life. I can say things like “these bags are heavy,” or “now there are lots of tourists here.” But not, “I am learning Uzbek” or “How do you say this in Uzbek?” This isn’t a criticism, just a thing I’m noticing.
• Related to my last point, I’m noticing that since I speak enough Turkish to use it as my base language for Uzbek on Glossika, common grammar patterns or contrasting grammar patterns jump out more quickly to me. Glossika doesn’t teach grammar at all. It only presents you with sentences to repeat. But they scale up from extremely simple (“She is at home”) to very extensive and complicated sentences. Little by little I’m noticing the change but I’m never worried about understanding all the rules. Occasionally I’ll look up a rule or pattern to find out more. But only if I want to or feel the need to. I really appreciate that.

The Week Ahead

• In the coming week I’m looking forward to doing my daily reps and my weekly lesson online. I’m finding it to be a good rhythm, and one that just about anyone can emulate too. That’s one of the things I like the most about using Glossika right now. Whereas with Duolingo, if I completed the daily streak requirement, I am not confident I would have actually learned anything all that helpful and I don’t think it would have required very much from me. Duolingo certainly has its place, but Glossika makes me feel like I can’t dodge actually engaging with the language a bit more to keep my streak going. And the accumulation of cumulative reps is good encouragement. It makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something big, a little bit at a time. I’m making progress.
• My lessons with my tutor online are helping give me one more outlet to make use of what I’m learning and help me be more engaged with it too.
• Anything else on top is just extra credit at this point. Next week I’ll share more about some other resources I’m finding. Since I haven’t used them at all yet, I’ll save them for when I can report some initial experience.