Milestone: 20,000 Repetitions with Glossika

I've just hit the 20,000 reps mark with Glossika.



Repetitions: 20,000

Sentences: 1,251

Repetition per sentence: 16

Time: 71:12 hours

Level: Russian Elementary, A1 High, 54.2%

Is Glossika useful for learning Russian? Has it benefited me? At the very least I think it's provided me with a lot or reading and pronunciation practice but I can't truthfully say to what extent it's benefited my understanding and speaking abilities.

There's a lot of blind faith involved with using Glossika and I understand why people don't want to spend the money for that (although I've noticed that they have a new payment structure where you can pay less for just learning a single language).

It should be noted that I haven't been as hardcore with this program as is recommended. They advocate 100 to 200 reps per day and I would usually do 50 to 75 with many extended breaks. This meant that I had built up a large backlog of reps. I didn't worry about it because I wasn't trying to memorise the sentences (I don't type or record my reps).

But over the past couple of months I've experienced a boost of motivation and 'ease' with the language. And the two feelings are self-reinforcing. I don't mean Russian is easy for me, rather that I'm increasingly comfortable with the difficulty of it.

When I first started I would get tired after 5 minutes of comprehensible input videos or reading 25 sentences in Glossika. Now I'm able to spend a lot longer with the language without being fatigued.

I spoke with someone on one of the forums, I can't remember if it was LingQ or the Refold Discord server who shared how many repetitions they had done and I calculated they had done 45 per sentence compared to my average of 16. I also learned that Donovan Nagel is a big advocate of being exposed to sentences and lexical chunks.

Lately I've been doing 100 repetitions per day (which takes about 15 minutes) and I'm finding it much easier than before. So perhaps that's an amount I can stick with, although it might become more challenging as the sentence difficulty increases.

These are the repetition milestones as defined by Glossika, which obviously isn't a prediction, rather an indication of what people are reporting.

  25,000 Reps → Speak sentences comfortably
  50,000 Reps → Start engaging in casual conversations at natural speeds
  75,000 Reps → Start honing skills with more specialized topics
 100,000 Reps → Mastery level where you can say just about anything

What is a "rep"? Why calculate them?


Do you use Glossika? What do you think of it?

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