This guide will cover:
What are glosses?
A ''gloss'' is kind of like a bullet-point translation.
It provides important context that will help you understand a sentence in your target language (TL), but isn’t a full translation in and of itself.
Our glosses show:
A literal translation of each word in the TL sentence
The order in which words appear in the TL
Some information about inflected words
The idea is that glosses enable you to break down a sentence and explore how it really works, even if you aren’t a linguist or don’t yet know your target language very well.
Currently, glosses are available for most sentences in our A1-low courses. We will roll them out for higher-level courses in the future. The higher-level glosses will gradually transition from “layperson” to “linguist” language. For example, where the A1-low gloss above says “school-at”, a similar B1 gloss would say “school(LOC)” — both indicating that park is in the locative case.
Why use glosses?
To be honest, we’re geeks about language and created these glosses mostly because we thought they’d be cool. Having said that, there are three specific ways we see them as being useful to learners:
1. Breaking down complex sentences
It’s hard to know what you don’t know.
If you’re totally new to French, you likely don’t know that aimer means to love, that la means her, or that you can smoosh verbs and object pronouns together in some circumstances. This could make a sentence like tu l’aimes? quite confusing. Which part is which? Glosses makes things easier by showing you what is where.
2. Seeing what a sentence literally means
While you can express any idea in any language, different languages usually take different approaches to expressing the same ideas. This can cause confusion for learners: translations aren’t always going to line up perfectly.
Glosses let you know that while a sentence may mean it’s raining, it actually says rain comes.
3. Learning a language without translation “interference”
While Glossika has traditionally presented content in native→target order, back in February we made it possible to swap language order and do target→native instead. Some people wanted us to take that a step further… so we did.
Glosses minimize your reliance on your base language, giving you a way to see what new words mean but not putting everything together for you.
How to Enable glosses?
1. Log into Glossika
2. Open a “Learn New Items” or “Review” session at the A1-low level
3. [Shown below] Click the /æ/ button (Ⓣ on the web app) below a Target Language sentence
4. [Shown below] Check “GLOSS” to enable glosses
5. If the “GLOSS” option isn’t available, please try again with the next sentence. Some A1-low sentences are missing glosses, and the “GLOSS” option will only display if a gloss is available for that sentence.