2020 Glossika Year in Review

by Sheena Chen

The year 2020 is one of the darkest in recent human memory, and the pandemic has changed the world. We'd like to share with you our insight on 2020.

Index

I. Our last video update in 2020

II. 2020 language ranking by popularity

Glossika provides 65 languages in 2020, and the top 3 popular languages are French, Japanese, and German:

The full ranking

Below is the list of the total languages organized by popularity:

Rank
Language
Rank
Language
Rank
Language
Rank
Language
1
 French
21
 Kurdish (Sorani)
41
 Hakka (Hailu)
61
 Bulgarian
2
 Japanese
22
 Hebrew
42
 Finnish
62
 Latvian
3
 German
23
 Irish
43
 Swahili
63
 Slovene
4
 English (US)
24
 Turkish
44
 Icelandic
64
 Azerbaijani
5
 Spanish (Mexican)
25
 Portuguese (Brazilian)
45
 Danish
65
 Belarusian
6
 Korean
26
 Wenzhounese
46
 Norwegian (Nynorsk)
7
 Spanish (Spain)
27
 Vietnamese (Southern)
47
 Czech
8
 Taiwanese Hokkien
28
 Arabic (Egyptian)
48
 Manx
9
 Mandarin Chinese (Beijing)
29
 Swedish
49
 Serbian
10
 Italian
30
 Hakka (Sixian)
50
 Arabic (Moroccan)
11
 English (UK)
31
 Welsh
51
 Georgian
12
 Russian
32
 Portuguese (Portugal)
52
 Mongolian
13
 Thai
33
 Hindi
53
 Lithuanian
14
 Cantonese
34
 Persian
54
 Uzbek
15
 Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan)
35
 Greek
55
 Bengali (India)
16
 Tagalog
36
 Croatian
56
 Ukraine
17
 Arabic (Standard)
37
 Hungarian
57
 Kazhak
18
 Catalan
38
 Polish
58
 Slovak
19
 Gaelic (Scottish)
39
 Vietnamese (Northern)
59
 Estonian
20
 Dutch
40
 Indonesian
60
 Arminian (Eastern)

For Asian languages, it’s not surprising that Japanese is the most popular Asian language. In the year of 2020, although Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games got postponed because of the pandemic, we can still see Japan’s strong presence in many aspects whether it’s animation, culture, or technology. For example, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi is the first international crew member to fly on a commercial crew mission in 2020, and Japanese anime Demon Slayer is the most popular animation in the world.


Korean ranks the second

The second most popular Asian language is Korean. Korean is getting more and more popular in recent years because of its culture.

The Korean movie Parasite (기생충) won the best picture and best director in the 2020 Academy Awards. The Korean pop group BTS was selected as Year of Artist by TIMES magazine and it’s no.1 hit song Dynamite is a worldwide sensation. If you look at the comments below its music video on YouTube, you’ll see fans from across the world.

Learn Spanish: European and Mexican account

Spanish (Mexican) ranks the fifth and Spanish (European) ranks the seventh in 2020. Because of the geolocation, learners in the United States of America tend to choose Spanish (Mexican) while in Asia, learners tended to select the European version.

There are also a lot of users who use Glossika to practice two versions of Spanish. This is effective, but we only recommend this way of learning if you’re familiar with one of the versions.

Taiwanese Hokkien is offered for free on Glossika and it's quite popular because there are not many learning resources available online for learning Taiwanese Hokkien (there are some resources available but mostly it is taught in Mandarin Chinese).

In Taiwan, Taiwanese Hokkien is mostly a spoken language. It does have its writing system, but it's not commonly used. If you are interested in learning Taiwanese Hokkien, we'd recommend focusing on your listening and speaking first instead of trying to read it.

There are two practice modes on Glossika, full practice and listening only. For the full practice mode, learners get to practice typing, listening, dictation, recording and interpretation. For the listening only mode, learners get to practice listening and recording.  

From the 2020 data, there was double usage for the listening mode compared to full practice. According to our observation, a lot of users like to do full practice mode for learning new items, and use the listening-only mode for review.

IV. Daily goals

Glossika developed a review algorithm to deliver personalized review items for individual leaners using memory decay rate, learning interaction, etc. To help learners better track their daily learning progress, we launched the daily goal feature. Most of learners prefer to accomplish 25 reps of new items and 75 reps of review with a total of 100 reps completed per day.

V. Share your 2020 achievements #glossika2020

At the end of 2020, we prepared "Your 2020 Achievements" for all learners. It shows your achievements on Glossika including top languages, accumulated reps and total hours spent. This data is available for download before January 15th, 2021 so be sure to download it on time and share with friends using #glossika2020.

VI. Speak Better in 2021

Glossika helps you speak better by using structured learning content. You'll be able to train to speak better gradually by easy to hard, short to long sentences. Sign up now, and start your 7-day free trial: