Glossika is a publisher of language courses. The company was created by James "Michael" Campbell, an American-Taiwanese polyglot who used the name Glossika on HTLAL and YouTube for several years. As of December 2018, Glossika is an online audiolingual course that uses a statistical algorithm to organize the content of each lesson for the user. Previously, they published their courses in book form.
Method Overview[]
The Glossika method is very similar to the audiolingual method of teaching. The user first hears an English sentence, then a translation of that sentence into the target language spoken by a native speaker at natural speed. The user is encouraged to repeat the sentence aloud and follow the rhythm of the recording.
The course is designed to be used each day for a short period of time. Each day's lessons consist of 80% review of the previous lessons and 20% new material. In this way, the new material is gradually internalized over a few days without conscious memorization on the part of the user.
By training full sentences at a time, the learner internalizes sentence structures and soon learns to manipulate the elements of the sentences in order to form new ones. In this way, syntax, morphology, and phonology are trained simultaneously.
History[]
The Glossika method has undergone several notable iterations over the years.
James Campbell, going by his middle name Mike, moved to Taiwan in 1997 and applied himself seriously to the study of Mandarin Chinese. After 18 months of effort, he had reached a level where he could find work as a translator, and this he did before opening his own translation company in the early 2000s. He created the Glossika website as a knowledge database about language learning and the sound systems of various dialects of Chinese. Later, he found work teaching English through Chinese and created learning materials for Chinese learners of English.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Glossika YouTube channel had many hundreds of videos about different languages of the world, as well as instructional videos. At that time, the method was quite similar to the 10,000 Sentences Method, though Glossika stressed audio recordings, repeated listening, and shadowing one's own recorded voice.
In 2014, the channel was deleted by YouTube. A new channel was launched with more of a focus on teaching different languages instead of conducting learning experiments or introducing new languages of the world. The old videos were never re-uploaded by Campbell himself, but a few mirrors exist.
At the same time, the Glossika website began to publish and sell collections of parallel sentences with audio, organized in a way that would slowly expose the learner to more and more complicated sentence structures as they worked through the book. The idea was that once a learner had studied 3000 sentences, they would be able to easily learn new vocabulary and apply it in the frameworks that they had mastered.
For several years, Glossika worked on improving its books and releasing content in more languages. In late 2017, a massive overhaul was carried out, abandoning the book format and moving to a subscription-based web app, which allowed for more individual lesson customization and faster release of new languages. Though there were many technical issues at first, many users feel that the new format is superior to the book and mp3 format. Other users remain convinced that the old format allowed for greater individual flexibility.