The Glossika material is great, but I think I am just as thankful for the method of learning that came out of it for me. I think it will be something that is sustainable for years to come after I have exhausted all that Glossika has to offer. The 3000 sentences are a great start, but they wont last forever, so I have started recording my own sentences that I mine and started mixing them into the flow. I didn’t really have a good method for this (sentence mining) before. Flashcards stink. For those wondering how my 1000/day thing is going - I have made my goal for each sentence to basically be memorization before I move on, and now have memorized 950 of the sentences. And it has really helped my speech take off. I almost know another 300 or so done on top of that. So, about 1200 new sentences/patterns in about a month and a half, and I am almost to learning sentences #2000-3000 already, which I am looking forward to since they are the harder ones. But I have now started doing 800 Glossika sentences, and 200 of my own sentences a day to make sure I am learning things specific to my situation, and it seems like a good balance. To make my own recordings as simple as possible (not quite as perfect as the official recordings) I take my computer to my language classes, open audacity, and leave it on the desk ready to capture sentences I want. I use a little mic (the headphone mic works ok that comes with your smartphone, but I use a Rode SmartLav). Shift+R appends each new sentence on the same track, and highlighting the sentence waveform and cmd+B lets you add a label that will become the track name. Then at the end of the day I just export multiple and add them to my itunes playlist. I have found that this doesn’t hardly interrupt the flow of conversation in class (assuming its not a group) and is just a tiny bit of post-production work, so easily sustainable. I tend to gather about 15 sentences an hour.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 06:33:26 +0000