Language learning ultimately boils down to determination and consistency.
The word learn is ambiguous. Some people will feel that they've learned a language if they can get by on vacation in the local language, while others wouldn't say that they've learned a language unless they can publish a book in it. At Glossika, we see our product as being like a bridge. Our goal is to help you learn a language well enough that you can leave the apps and textbooks behind and begin making language progress as a byproduct of doing things you find interesting.
Glossika will not make you completely fluent — no single one thing will. You won't wake up one day and find that, as if a light had switched on, you can now understand your target language. However, step by step, you will work towards a point where you realize that it's now possible to read books, have conversations, and such.
To cross "the bridge" of Glossika, we expect that most learners will need 9–12 months of dedicated effort in which they learn 10–15 sentences per day and do all of the reviews scheduled by Glossika each day. This will amount to over 50,000 reps, and you'll reach six main milestones while on that journey.
What you need to do to learn a language
The good news is that Glossika has already done the hard work of determining what you should learn and when. That means that all we have to ask of you is consistency.
Specifically, we need you to:
1. Log into Glossika each day
2. Review the items Glossika has scheduled for review
3. After finishing reviews, learn 10–15 new items
4. Listen carefully and repeat after the native speaker
5. Use full-practice mode as much as possible
If you can keep up with those five steps for a year, you'll see incredible progress.
Factors that affect how long this is going to take
While we give nine months as a ballpark estimate, there are a bunch of factors that can lead you see progress more quickly or slowly than that.
1. How fluent do you want/need to be?
The great (and frustrating) part about language is that we never stop learning. I'm a native English speaker, but I can't write like Raymond Carver or Alice Munro. The same goes for foreign languages, too: you've got a long road ahead of you if you want to be totally bilingual — likely a lifetime! — but if you only need to know the language well enough to enjoy a conversation while you're abroad, that's much more manageable.
Importantly, we learn by doing. You shouldn't wait until you're fluent to have conversations and read books and watch YouTube. Conversely, you make progress toward fluency by using your language to do those things. We encourage you to aim for a confident low-intermediate level with Glossika, then to move on and continue refining your skills by using your language to do something that's important to you.
2. Is this a language you previously studied at school?
If so, great! Even if you don't feel like you got very far in school, you probably have at least a rough grasp on some very important basics: what the language sounds like, some essential grammar points, and a bit of vocabulary. All that stuff is still somewhere in your brain, and you'll start remembering it as you work through Glossika.
3. How different is this language from your native language?
If you're learning a Western European language like Spanish or French, you're in luck. These languages have all sorts of similarities with English, from the vocabulary and idioms they use to the way they structure sentences. If you're learning an Eastern European, African, or Asian language, the learning curve will be a bit rougher it'll take more time to see progress because less of your English is going to "transfer".
If that sort of thing is interesting to you, consider familiarizing yourself with the structure of language families. Try looking up your language on Wikipedia and check to see what family and branch it's in. Doing so gives you useful information like this:
English is Germanic in structure and grammar, but has a large number of vocabulary from Romance languages. Therefore, English is halfway between the Germanic and Romance languages. For this reason, any Western European language in these branches are easily accessible to native English speakers.
If your native language is Korean, the situation is different. Korean is not related to any other language, but it does have some characteristics that make it similar to a few languages. The structure of Korean is more or less the same as Japanese, for example, and both Japanese and Korean have a significant amount of shared vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese. As such, a Korean speaker will find parts of both Japanese and Mandarin to be familiar/accessible.
Basically: the more similar your target language is to your native language, the less time it will take you to reach a functional level in.
4. How many languages have you learned in the past?
Hands down, the hardest language to learn is your very first foreign language.
When you learn your first language, you're not just learning that language. You've also got to learn a ton stuff about linguistics, psychology, and how you learn. You probably don't yet have strategies that reliably get you over your hurdles, and you might not have found resources which suit you yet. Learning subsequent languages becomes easier because all of that "meta" knowledge comes with you. If you learn the subjunctive mood in Spanish, you don't have to learn it again when you move on to French — you already know what the subjunctive is and why it's used, so all you have to do is learn what it looks like in French.
That in mind, if you feel like your progress is slow, just know that it's normal. Consider working through a textbook with a tutor or teacher, look for opportunities to immerse in your target language's media, and do whatever it takes to get through the beginning stages. Eventually you'll find an approach that works for you — and so long as you keep doing your reps and making progress, you'll reach the intermediate stage.