Along the Silk Road

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Welcome back for another weekly check-in on my 90-Day Uzbek Challenge using mostly Glossika. You can check out the plan here in my original post. Each week I’m checking in to share my progress both in terms of reps completed for the week and overall reps completed, as well as to share anything I’m discovering along the way. My hope is that my little experiment may serve to encourage you to take your next steps in learning your next language. I also hope my experience with Glossika can give you a sense of what kind of value it provides and whether or not it is a great fit for you as a tool in your learning journey.

Glossika Progress

This week I completed the exact same number of reps as last week. I completed 1,075 reps for a cumulative total of 5,410 reps. It felt good to cross the 5,000 reps threshold. I have mentioned before that seeing the number of total reps pile up over time is a motivating thing. It isn’t just increasing my streak count, it is growing my pile of completed reps. I think that’s significant. If I break my streak at some point, it would feel really demotivating if that’s my key metric I’m tracking. I actually don’t care that much about my streak. I definitely want to keep it going, but the metric I’ll be looking at at the end of my challenge is the total reps completed, not the length of my streak.

Things I’m Noticing

Glossika seems to me to be a bit like focused training when it comes to language learning. There are no frills. There is a bit of a regimented plan for you to work. You don’t need to figure anything out for yourself, you just need to do your daily training. Consistency is a really important factor (which is true for just about anything, including language learning) and getting a sufficient amount of contact with the language is important too. I suppose that if I were learning a rather difficult language for a native English speaker to learn with no prior exposure or familiarity to it or its broader family of languages, I might keep a lower goal for daily reps on Glossika. Speficially, if the language I was learning had a difficult script (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Georgian, etc.) then I’m not sure Glossika would be the best starting point. At a minimum I think I would need to spend some solid time getting comfortable with the script first so that I could make some sense of what I was seeing on my reps.

It has been interesting to work on learning a language that is so poorly resourced compared to others. When I started with Turkish, I felt the same way when I compared it to Spanish, French, and even Russian among others. Those languages seemed to have every resource you could hope to find. I found that there was more than plenty resources available for Turkish. If you compared the Duolingo courses, for example, those romance languages had all of the bells and whistles. Turkish was not nearly so supported. I felt like I was getting slighted a bit and I could see that my subscription dollars weren’t getting me as much as they would if I were learning Spanish or French. Some of the tiny minority languages they support, however, were giving access to those languages that didn’t have any resources anywhere else yet. So the sheer fact that they existed on Duolingo was a win for anyone interested in learning them. Turkish was in the gray area in the middle somewhere. Relatively well-supported, but always missing features. I found this to be true in other resources than just Duolingo.

I knew this specific difference about Glossika before I started this challenge, but I can appreciate the value of it now. While some languages have more sentences than others, it feels like Glossika has parity between languages. I don’t sense that I’m lacking anything in comparison between Turkish and Uzbek. In fact, seeing that I have nearly 30,000 reps in Turkish on Glossika, I feel it more keenly that I am getting good material and appropriately wide amounts of it with Uzbek. For the few other resources out there that exist for Uzbek, I don’t sense that I’m missing anything at this point while using Glossika.

To be fair, I’m working with a tutor on iTalki each week. It is a secondary component for my plan rather than a primary. It adds value but it just an hour a week. I like how it is giving me opportunity to process what I’m learning, to learn some of the structural stuff Glossika doesn’t teach, and gives me a chance to interact with a native speaker. Currently, I’m taking class-like lessons where we’re doing direct instruction rather than conversation practice or full-immersion style learning. I don’t really want that right now anyway. I started in a similar way with Turkish. It was good for the first stretch of learning. For now, I’m enjoying the pace and progress. I don’t have any urgency to reach any specific goal other than keeping the best streak I can, getting a good number of reps in over 90 days, and building a learning habit. It’s a lot of fun!

The Week Ahead

In the week ahead I would be happy just to maintain what I’m doing. My daily streak of accumulating reps and my weekly online lesson. As I have said before, I’m doing this at a pace nearly anyone can handle. I’m only doing 1 hour a week of 1:1 tutoring online. My tutor’s hours offer me the flexibility of morning, afternoon, and evening slots, so there’s always something that can work. I definitely have to spend about 20 minutes or so each day to knock out my reps but it’s doable enough I haven’t missed a day, even when I realized late in the day I hadn’t even thought about getting started. I definitely have to pause what I’m doing to knock out my reps, but it doesn’t take forever. And the amount of time it takes and the repetition of having to actually say all the sentences out loud makes me feel like I’m actually doing something useful rather than just tapping a few buttons to finish a lesson without really engaging the language.

This week, I just want to stay engaged. That’s the challenge and I like the momentum and progress of staying engaged and keeping on. Let’s just keep on.