Sixth Sense: Glossika Review

Glossika’s mascot is an owl, just like Duolingo; that’s how you know it’s legit. Or something. I dunno. All I know is Elina, one of the top supporters of this blog, recommended that I take a look at Glossika. It took a few weeks, but I finally got around to it. Hopefully it was worth the wait 🙂

Price

Unlike the other sites I’ve reviewed, Glossika isn’t a freemium service. Instead, it requires a subscription for you to have access to their courses. And I’m not gonna lie, it’s a bit more expensive than some of the other websites I’ve looked at. There are three subscription packages that you can choose from: $30/month for one month, $24/month for one year, and $199/month for their special Enterprise service. From what I’ve seen, though, Enterprise doesn’t really look like it’s worth that much money. In my opinion, I’d stick to the first two payment plans- they offer just about everything that the Enterprise plan does, with the only big difference being that Enterprise allows multiple users on one account while the others don’t.

Luckily, Glossika lets every user sign up for a free trial of all their courses before they have to buy a subscription, so you can see if you really enjoy the mechanics of the site before spending a single cent. No commitment necessary.

 

Languages

Glossika is home to 50+ language courses, which is a huge amount to choose from, in all honesty. Most of these are languages you have to pay for, which is par for the course (get it?), but there are nine courses that are completely free- Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka (Sixian), Hakka (Hailu), Wenzhounses (Wu), Kurdish (Sorani), Catalan, Manx, Welsh, and Gaelic. They do not require any subscription whatsoever- you just have to create an account in order to access them. The reason that these specific courses are free is that they aren’t as commonly spoken as other languages, and therefore aren’t as easy to find courses on as a whole. Some are even endangered. So Glossika wants to not only make these languages as accessible as possible for people who have been searching to try and learn them, but they also want to encourage people to learn in order to help preserve these languages.

So, if this site seems a little pricey (and, I won’t lie, it does seem a bit expensive to me) and you really don’t want to sign up for a subscription, take a look at those nine. They’re not as common of languages, which can be a downside for some learners, but they’re completely free with a Glossika account. It’s a good option if you’re interested in the site, but not thrilled with the price. And it’s a pretty cool conversation starter to say you can speak an endangered language. Advantages all the way around.

Courses

Like with most of these sites, Glossika has one main course per language. They have their program, and you have to follow it, which makes sense since they developed the website. What I liked, though, was the fact that you could select languages to learn by their name, their language family, or their language region, which is a really great way to see what languages are similar to what you’re trying to learn- it can lead to more learning in the future, or just a way to know if it’s the right one for you.

But, while Glossika is like other sites by just having one main course, where it differs is the fact that it is extremely customizable. I even italicized it so you know I mean business. Firstly, you can select the speed at which you learn; if you’re a fast learner that likes to go from topic to topic, awesome. If you like to take a little bit more time to really understand, that’s great, too! You can customize how often words get repeated, if at all, what sentences you want to ignore, if you want more advanced content, all the fun stuff.  But probably the best thing to customize are the actual topics you want to learn in a lesson. 

The picture up above shows all the topics for the Spanish course. For each lesson, you have to pick one of the top three (social, travel, or business) in order to continue, but otherwise, you can select any of the topics to learn. If you want to only learn the one mandatory one, you can. If you want to learn every single one, like I did, then you can do that, too, along with any other combination of topics. And there are some pretty neat ones in there, as well, like crime, traffic, and accidents, among others. But I think this system is really unique, and not one that I’ve seen before. So the customizable content is definitely a huge bonus for Glossika.

Features

Unlike the other websites, Glossika doesn’t really have a huge amount of bonus features that are meant to help you learn. However, they do have different styles of lessons, so I’ll explain that here, instead, along with one other bonus that I really enjoyed:

Lesson Types:

1. Listening:  This is the default lesson, where you listen to a phrase in your native language, and then have it translated into the language you’re learning. No typing or translation involved, just listening and learning.
2. Typing: Here, you either have a phrase in your native language that you type out in your target language or vice versa. You can learn grammar and sentence structure, which are both incredibly important for learning another language.
3. Dictation: This is meant to test your listening skills. You are told a phrase in your target language and have to type it out to show how well you can understand it when it’s spoken.
4. Fill-in: This one is pretty much what it sounds like. You’re given a sentence, written entirely in your target language, with a missing word or phrase. You have to select the right one from a list of options in order to continue.
5. Multiple Choice: Here, you’re given the phonetic transcript of a certain phrase (it could be about anything) and you have to pick what it actually looks like when written. From my personal experience, this one is the most difficult, but it’s also pretty neat, because I’ve never seen a lesson quite like it!

(Kind-of) Bonus Feature:

I don’t really think that this totally counts as an individual feature, but I wasn’t sure where else to put it, and I feel that it deserves a shout-out. So it’s going here. Anyway, before you decide to start learning a language, you can a page dedicated to essentially briefing you about it. It gives you a full rap-sheet of what to expect and how the language is structured. This is an example of the English-to-Spanish page:

It tells you the difficulty of the language, languages that are similar to it, languages that are the least like it, the family of the language, pronunciation, grammar, word order, and vocabulary structure. Honestly, it’s a great introduction to what you’re learning, and a way to really get your toes wet before diving right in. It’s something that really stood out to me when I was checking out this website, and I think it’s incredibly useful to have. It deserved some props (people still say that, right?).

How it Works

Do you remember all the nature metaphors we had in the earlier posts? Cause we’re going back to metaphors to explain Glossika. It’s not outdoors-themed, but hey. A metaphor is a metaphor.

The main idea of Glossika’s teaching system is that learning a language is like building muscle. In order to learn, you have to do “reps” every day to make your brain stronger, just like you have to do reps to make your muscles stronger. For the purpose of language-learning, Glossika counts every new word or phrase as a rep. And the more reps you do, the stronger your muscles get- or, in this case, the better you’ll be at understanding your target language. Basically, this website acts as a gym for your brain, and if you do one session of reps a day (the number of which can vary but is always in the double-digits), you’ll be on the right track to becoming at least conversational in your target language. They even have a handy-dandy chart here to explain their system:

The ultimate goal is to get to 100,000 reps in your target language. Once you do, you’ll basically be fluent, or something very close to it. However, it’s really important to note that on the free trial (which comes with every non-free language) you only get 1,000 reps before you have to pay. That’s it: and it’s a far cry from the 100,000 end-goal. Just something that I think is important to note here. Overall, Glossika=gym, reps=brain-training; keeping it simple.

Final Thoughts

Glossika is a bit different from other sites I’ve looked at mostly because it pretty much requires a subscription, except in a few instances. It doesn’t come with a lot of bonus features added to it, which is especially surprising considering that the subscription is fairly pricey, but it does host an incredible amount of languages to learn. Not to mention the fact that it provides more than one way to actually do the learning, which is something I haven’t seen done quite as well as Glossika does. So they get some brownie points here.

Overall, I’m not sure if the price is honestly worth it for the content. You can definitely find something similar for a lot less, or even free, and it has a lot more added bonuses on the side. BUT I’d honestly consider using it for learning the less common languages- AKA, the totally free courses mentioned earlier in the review. A lot of those languages can be hard to find, and by choosing to learn them, you don’t have to pay a cent. So if Glossika sounds like the perfect site for you, I would suggest checking out one of those languages first for two reasons: 1. it’s a rarely spoken language, and it’s neat to be able to even understand the tiniest bit of it, and 2. you can get a feel for how the website works before you make any commitment, and without waiting for your free trial to expire. At the end of the day, though, it’s up to you to decide what works for you, and if Glossika sounds like the best website you’ve ever heard of and you want to sign up right now, have a ball and enjoy your learning!

As an end note, Elina, the person who recommended I review Glossika, has a blog of her own! She’s trying to learn six languages in one year, and she posts really awesome updates about her (really incredible) journey to polyglot-dom! Check out her blog if you’re interested: http://www.thepolyglotpath.wordpress.com