Glossika Review: Excellent for Learning Naturally and In-context, but Can Get Repetitive

Glossika uses spaced repetition and sentence training to teach vocabulary and grammar as naturally as possible. I had heard good things about it years ago, but it kind of fell under my radar until now.

I studied Portuguese for a while back in 2020, and I recently got the urge to get back to it. So I figured now would be a good time to see if Glossika can be the one to get me back on track. This is my honest experience using the Glossika program.

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What is Glossika and How Does it Work?

Glossika uses two main principles to teach languages: spaced repetition and sentence training. You don’t memorize words with Glossika. You learn small sentences of one to three words (in the beginning) with their translations so your brain picks out the meaning of each word in context.

You also never study grammar—it’s introduced to you naturally through the sentences that build on each other over time.

There are over 55 languages available on Glossika, including nine minoritized languages: Catalan, Gaelic, Hakka (Sixian), Hakka (Hailu), Kurdish (Sorani), Manx, Welsh, Taiwanese and Wenzhounese.

Main Features of Glossika

Repetition sentence flashcards

The lessons are called “Sessions.” When I start my Portuguese sessions, I’m shown a flashcard with a sentence in English on the top and Portuguese on the bottom. The audio repeats both out loud.

You can choose between “listening-only mode” or “full-practice mode.” I’ve used both, and I prefer the full practice one. It asks me to type out the sentence in Portuguese after hearing and reading it, and then there’s a recording feature that lets me repeat the sentence aloud.

As I get further into the sessions, the cards start getting a little harder. After a few reps, Glossika only showed me the English sentence and let me hear the Portuguese audio, but I couldn’t see the written sentence in Portuguese. I then have to type it out according to what I hear.

Daily reviews

When you log in, there are two options: “Learn” and “Review.” You can set a daily goal for each—I have mine set to 25 reps for the “Learn” feature and 50 reps for “Review.”

At first, I thought the “zero” on the review bar meant I had zero reviews due. But after using Glossika a bit more, I realized it actually doesn’t tell you how many cards are due—you do your reviews daily until you reach the goal you set. It’s more like a progress bar.

When starting my reviews, Glossika lets me choose which cards I want to focus on.

Priority reviews are personalized to my current progress. The session quizzes me on my recently learned items, starting with the newest to keep them fresh in my memory.

Weakest memories are the sentences I haven’t reviewed in a while, so I’m likely about to forget them.

Collection is all my learned items and the review session covers as many of them as my goal is set.

The reviews are pretty much the exact same as the “learn” sessions. The program plays through the flashcards you studied in previous sessions and you can choose listening-only or full-practice mode.

Progress and achievements tracking

Glossika has several ways of tracking progress and they’re easy to find in the dashboard. The “Achievements” section keeps track of the number of times you’ve achieved your daily “learn” goal, your review goal, how many hours you’ve studied, amount of reps you’ve done and how many sentences you’ve learned.

The “Levels” section is a collection of bar graphs to show your progress in each CEFR level.

Even though I studied Portuguese for three months in 2020 and achieved a B1 level after taking an online proficiency test (most likely due to my Spanish skills carrying me through it—but we don’t talk about that), I decided to start with A1. After using Glossika for two days, I’m 2.7% done with the Low Elementary level.

Each CEFR level is broken down into two parts: “Low” and “High.” So after finishing the Low A1 level, I’ll move on to the High A1 level—but it’s still beginner.

I absolutely love this thoroughness. Many language programs use the CEFR levels to represent their own but fall really short by not being completely honest about how far the course takes you. For example, I remember back in the day when Duolingo had a “percentage to fluency” feature—it said I was over 50% fluent in Spanish when I probably wouldn’t have even passed a B1 practice test.

For many languages—Portuguese included—the levels reach up to C1 “high.”

Finally, the “Progress” section is your week-at-a-glance. It uses graphs to show how many “Learn” and “Review” reps you’ve done each day.

Personal library

To the right of the “dashboard” tab there’s the “library” tab. Your library is all the sentences you’ve studied along with their audio and memory strength. This lets you see which sentences you’re about to forget.

You can also “favorite” sentences. Honestly, I’m not sure how useful this is—but I guess it would be good to use if there’s a particular sentence you want to come back to later.

The “recordings” tab is a collection of all your recordings. As you’ll see later on, I have a small bone to pick with the recording feature on Glossika, but I do like that it saves them. The native speaker audio comes right beside the recordings, so I could compare my pronunciation with the Brazilian woman’s.

Lastly, the “easy” tab is for all the words you mark as easy. I’ve only done this with one Portuguese phrase so far. When Glossika introduces a new flashcard, you have the option of marking it as already known. I did this with vamos (let’s go) since it’s the same in Spanish.

Pros of Glossika

Grammar is introduced naturally through the sentences

I’m the first to admit that I’m a grammar nerd when it comes to languages. After I had completed my C1 Spanish course and had no more tenses to learn, I felt kind of disappointed.

But with that being said, I’m actually really excited to keep taking the “comprehensible input” approach to grammar for Portuguese. I’m learning basic grammar already even though I’ve only learned 15 sentences. For example, today I learned the phrase vai chover (it’s going to rain). Just from practicing it, I can tell that chover means “to rain” and using vai is similar to the ir + a + infinitive structure in Spanish.

The new sentences also get longer the more I learn, so my ability to construct full sentences grows (even if it’s just slightly) with every session.

It offers tons of languages

One of my favorite things about Glossika is the amount of languages it offers. There are 55 total, and with one subscription you get access to all of them. Nine of the languages are minority languages as I mentioned above.

I was also surprised by the depth of some of the language courses. For example, Egyptian Arabic goes up to high C1 like Portuguese. In the past, I found that most Arabic courses taking you past an intermediate level were in the Modern Standard dialect.

I wanted to see how far the minority language courses would take you, so I added Hakka—a minority Chinese dialect from the Sichuan province—to my courses. And to my surprise, the highest level was still high C1. This could be another case of a program exaggerating how advanced they get you, but regardless, it’s an impressive amount of vocabulary for a minority language.

The courses are simple and easy to follow

The simplicity of Glossika makes it easy to log in and study every day. You can create a custom daily goal, but Glossika’s recommended minimum is 25 reps—which is what mine is set as. I’ve found that getting my 25 reps done only takes me about 10 minutes.

This makes the Glossika training sessions almost addicting. It’s so satisfying seeing the number of cards I flip through, and seeing my progress bars increase after doing something so easy makes me want to keep going.

Completing the course is just a matter of continuing to show up and do exactly that—let your 25 (or whatever number you set) flashcards play and do your reviews.

High-quality native speaker audio

Many programs say they use native speaker audio, but it still ends up sounding a bit robotic. Glossika’s audio uses recordings of native speakers and it’s actually high-quality.

When learning new sentences, the audio plays twice with about a second or two in between. I just wish the recordings were a little more separated because I like to repeat after the native speaker. With the sentences so far, I’ve still been able to—but I’m not sure if that will be the case once they get longer.

One way I know the audio is great is that when I went to the “recordings” tab in my library, I was shocked by how much my own pronunciation mimicked the native speaker’s. I normally cringe at my accent when starting a new language, but I actually felt super proud of it—I have to credit that to the clear, high-quality audio.

Many of the courses take you to a high intermediate to advanced level

I don’t say “C1 level” specifically here because there is some controversy as to whether you’ll really be C1 proficient by the end of the course. But what I can say is that there are thousands of sentences available to study.

I did some Googling to see what other users were saying on discussion forums like Reddit and found the general consensus is that Glossika will take you to an intermediate level at least.

Glossika has a Reddit account and replied to one user’s question in this forum about why there weren’t many sentences in the C1 levels. They say that most of the sentences are in the A1 to B1 levels, but they’re planning to add around 10,000 more sentences in the near future—including plans to add on to the C1 courses.

You can also always retake the placement test if the course starts feeling too easy (or difficult).

Full practice mode lets you practice writing, listening and speaking

I recommend using the full practice mode when doing your Glossika training sessions. The listening-only option is great when you’re crushed for time, but full practice gives you everything—reading, listening, writing and speaking.

You start by listening to the English sentence one time. Then, the target language sentence plays twice. It also includes a phonetic pronunciation guide and the literal translation below. Once the native speaker recording ends, you’re prompted to type the target language sentence and then record yourself saying it.

There’s only one thing I would change. After a certain amount of reps, I would’ve liked to see a progression where I didn’t hear the Portuguese sentence and just had to write and record it from memory. About halfway through the session, they do hide the Portuguese sentence, but I still heard it. So the writing part is more like a dictation exercise.

Cons of Glossika

Training exercises can feel very repetitive

Glossika is built on repetition—and that’s exactly what the training and review sessions are. You learn five new sentences in each “learn” session and complete 25 reps, so you’re repeating each sentence five times.

Although it doesn’t take long to finish them, I found myself dozing off and daydreaming a few times—I would just repeat after the native speaker but not really think about the sentence because my mind was elsewhere. That’s another reason I’d like some kind of quiz where I wasn’t just dictating the recording—it’s easy to get distracted.

Using full practice mode can be complicated with non-Latin script languages

Like I said before, the full practice mode is my favorite to use for Portuguese. But I wanted to see how it worked with a non-Latin script, so I switched to the Egyptian Arabic course.

I found the writing exercises pretty much useless if you’re not writing in the actual script yet. Glossika counts the answer correct if you use your English keyboard to answer the way the phonetics guide is written, but I found this just more complicated. I ended up getting the same sentences wrong multiple times because I wasn’t used to the script, even though I was pronouncing the word right.

After reading through the Reddit discussions earlier, I found that this is also a shared sentiment among other Glossika users.

My recommendation? Just stick to the listening-only mode for languages with foreign scripts until you feel really comfortable typing in it.

The recording feature does not correct wrong pronunciation or answers

Here comes the bone I said I had to pick with the recording feature. While I think it’s awesome that Glossika saves your recordings so you can compare them with a native speaker, it never corrects your mispronunciation during the training sessions.

At first, this actually left me wondering what the record feature was even for (until I found them in the library).

I wanted to test this before I counted it as an actual con, so when it prompted me to repeat one of my new Portuguese sentences, I said a completely different one on purpose. It didn’t say it was right, but it didn’t say it was wrong, either. So I think this is a feature Glossika could add to make the program even better.

How Much Does Glossika Cost?

Glossika offers monthly and annual subscriptions in three tiers, plus a free version.

The free version is only for the nine minority language courses, but you get full access to them—so no locked features you have to pay for. I love this model of encouraging more people to study languages that are either almost endangered or already are.

The basic plan gives you unlimited access to one language course. But you can change the target language once every 30 days. It costs $16.99 monthly or $159.96 annually.

The pro plan gives you unlimited access to all the language courses. It’s $30.99 monthly or $300 annually.

Finally, there’s an enterprise option for businesses, schools and families. The accesses are custom built and you’ll need to contact sales to get a quote.

Alternatives to Glossika

Memrise

Like Glossika, Memrise teaches languages through flashcards and spaced repetition. They offer 26 languages including Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Hindi, Mongolian and more.

Once you choose your language, the course is broken down into smaller courses and “paths” that cover specific topics, like Activities, Education, Basics, Opinions, Relationships and more.

You’re introduced to new words on a flashcard and then complete reps of various exercises until you’ve “mastered them.” These include matching, translating, listening and others.

Memrise also includes videos of native speakers acting out scenes. Depending on your level, they’re between a few seconds and a few minutes, and there’s a comprehension quiz at the end.

If you want to learn more about Memrise, I suggest checking out our full review here.

FluentU

17 Minute Languages

17 Minute Languages has an impressive amount of languages like Glossika—it offers languages like Albanian, Belarusian, Latvian and of course, the common ones like Spanish and French.

It introduces new words using flashcards like Memrise and Glossika, but instead of having you do multiple reps of various exercises, it presents you with the English side first and if you don’t know the translation yet, you mark it as new.

The courses focus on teaching you the most common words first. They’re based on frequency, so you can start having and understanding conversations much faster. But this means some of the words are random and don’t follow a particular topic.

The name reflects the method—the program recommends spending 17 minutes daily going through the flashcards, but you can set a custom timer, too. Once you start a study session, the timer starts counting down and it doesn’t end until you’ve reached your time goal.

Finally, the spaced repetition algorithm brings back your learned words after certain intervals to maximize the time they stay in your long-term memory.

Final Thoughts: Should You Use Glossika?

I’ve loved my experience with Glossika so far and highly recommend it, especially for beginners who want to take a more natural, immersive approach.

Use the full practice mode to get the most out of your study sessions. But if your target language uses a foreign script, it’s best to stick with just the listening mode until you’ve learned its alphabet.

 

While there are a few things I think Glossika could improve on—like the recording feature that I think has lots of potential—its affordability, huge sentence library and simple study features have made it one of my new favorite language learning apps and I plan to continue using it for Portuguese.