Glossika Learning Guide (from PDF)

How You Can

Achieve

Fluency

like Polyglots

Most people start learning foreign languages by learning to read the alphabet first. Some of the world's greatest polyglots rarely do this because they know there is a be<er way. The reason for this is because there is a big disconnect between the spoken word and the wri<en word. Experienced language learners understand this.

You may be thinking, "I'm not a polyglot." If I don't learn the alphabet then how am I supposed to pronounce this language?

I'll show you how. Anybody can become an accomplished language learner, in much less Fme than you think. But you do need to adjust your approach.

Cool

Fact

1.    Less than half the people who have learned to speak Mandarin Chinese fluently have learned the wriFng system. They can hold a conversaFon with friends and family in Chinese even without knowing how to read and write. This is possible for any language you'd like to learn.

2.    There are 6900 languages in the world, of which only

200        or so naFonal languages have standard wriFng systems. All other languages are never wri<en; only spoken.

WriFng systems are more Fed to culture than to the actual languages they represent. In other words, if we represent the sounds of the language accurately, we can save you a lot of Fme trying to figure out a new wriFng system.

If so much of the world speaks languages that are not wri<en, and yet interact with their neighbors in another unwri<en language, and they manage this without textbooks, vocabulary lists, tests, then how do they do it?

Think about your own community. How about the children who haven't started going to school yet. Do they speak your language fluently? Have they learned how to read and write yet? Do they know anything about grammar and spelling? Probably not. Are they able to express themselves and create new sentences anyFme they want? Probably yes! How can they be fluent without knowing these things?

We can learn like children. Exposure develops familiarity. Learning like children doesn't mean abandoning textbooks enFrely. So let me show you what you need to break through to fluency.

How to Measure Progress with Reps

Learning a language like a polyglot means that you spend very li<le Fme on basic things: what is a noun, what is a verb, what is an adjecFve, and so on. Nouns are things. Verbs are acFons. AdjecFves describe things. And these parts of speech change in most languages. Polyglots know this and they don't worry about it. They just start pracFcing.

Let's visit a gym. What are you most likely to see people doing there? Besides jogging, probably li[ing weights. All those machines laying around look a bit confusing and inFmidaFng. But for those working out, there's an order in which they use them, there's a specific number of li[s they do, and there's a specific amount of rest Fme between each exercise.

The weightli[er knows there are machines for the arms, the legs, the back and so on. Much like the polyglot, they don't really worry about the details, they just start working out.

The typical weightli[er at the gym will do several sets, with each set made up of repeFFons, or "reps". Each rep has a specific amount of weight.

Fluency Requires This Many Reps

Think about this scenario: if I were to give you a daily workout schedule on these machines every day for the next few months, and you were to do a total of 60,000 reps, what do you think you'd look like at the end of that training? You'd probably look like a completely different person. You'll be

in shape, you'll be fit, and you'll both look and feel great. If I were to challenge you to any athleFc endeavour, you'd be very confident and handle it without a problem.

We've found that the same holds true with language: you need to do lots of reps. Those reps need to be done in a specific order for best results. You'll get be<er results spending your Fme on reps rather than on memorizaFon.

You'll start to feel the effects of fluency coming on when you hit 30,000 reps. You'll be confidently using the language at around 60,000 reps. And we recommend to keep pushing unFl you've done 90,000 reps.

Using an easy-to-follow system, it's not hard to go through 500 sentences per day. At that rate, you'll get through 60,000 reps in 120 days, which is 4 months. That's about a semester in university. And most students coming out of language classes have barely done 5000 reps, less than 10% of your progress. It's no wonder they won't feel fluent and they'll certainly be wondering how you did it. Yet, you’ll know the secret to success.

What about Grammar and Pronunciation?

All of this will fall in place as long as you focus on your full sentence reps. For one thing, grammar is already built into place in full sentences. You'll be learning the most frequent grammar forms as naFve speakers speak. And that's the exposure we give you.

PronunciaFon is very much like a muscle. The more you pracFce and use it, the be<er it gets. Don't expect results in one day. It takes Fme. Learn to hear what you sound like and adjust the way you sound.

It's be<er not to worry about mistakes in grammar or pronunciaFon and just to keep pracFcing. The more pracFce you do, the less you'll have to worry about.

What We Know from Polyglots

Polyglots approach language learning knowing they can acquire a language in a short period of Fme. So they tend to seek out the most effecFve methodologies to help them achieve this. There's no need to waste Fme on ineffecFve textbooks, rote memorizaFon, or language classes that focus on grammar. Polyglots know that the wriFng system can both be an asset and a liability, and in the beginning, it's be<er to get speaking quickly, then later couple those skills with the wriFng system to acquire vocabulary at a much quicker rate. Learning the wriFng system in this way saves lots of Fme and prevents major pronunciaFon errors.

The founder of Glossika, Michael Campbell, is a polyglot. But he's unlike most polyglots you may have heard of such as: Richard Simco<, Vladimir Skultety, Luca Lampariello, Benny Lewis, Steve Kaufmann, Olly Richards. What makes Michael different from them?

Not only has Michael acquired many unwri<en languages, he's also acquired languages from a half dozen language families. He's much more similar to polyglot Stuart Jay Raj in this respect.

In a video produced by accomplished polyglot, Vladimir, he stated that Chinese was the hardest language he had ever learned, a statement he made clear that has nothing to do with the wriFng whatsoever. This was because all of his European languages felt like variaFons or dialects of each other. He hadn't been truly challenged with a real "foreign" language unFl he learned Chinese. Michael Campbell, on the other hand, feels that Chinese was one of the easiest languages to learn and now speaks four Chinese languages and another handful of aboriginal Austronesian languages. But his reasons are slightly different than Vladimir’s.

Michael Campbell has been invited to speak at conferences, has appeared on television and radio, and has done many press interviews in Chinese.

Between 2001 and 2010, Michael Campbell tested and developed his methods while he lead the way for more than 10,000 students to fluency: average language learners like yourself. He now welcomes you to join the hundreds of thousands of people he has had the pleasure to influence and guide since then.

Today, the Glossika method is known worldwide and ranks among the highest performing programs and hailed by many as "Pimsleur on Steroids”. John McWhorter, professor of linguisFcs at Columbia University, recommended Glossika in his TED talk “4 Reasons to Learn a New Language”. Glossika is now used in universiFes worldwide in the USA, UK, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, China, New Zealand, including members of staff at MIT. It is used by government officials and those training for diplomaFc roles.

Comparisons with Leading Products

1. Hours of Audio

In a single package, Glossika provides you with over 120 hours of audio spoken by naFve speakers. Compare this with Assimil's 3.3 hours, Living Languages 6 hours, Pimsleur's 75 hours (for its few largest courses).

Hours of Audio

120

90

60

30

0

Assimil                                       Pimsleur                                       Glossika

2. Vocabulary

Glossika builds a vocabulary of 3500 words, approximately the same as Assimil and 5x more than Pimsleur.

3. Content

Glossika contains 3000 conversaFonal sentences, many of which are quesFon & answer mini-dialogues. Far more than any other course on the market.

4. Writing Systems

Glossika handles hard wriFng systems with ease: naFve script plus full transcripFons plus pronunciaFon guide for every single sentence (with an easy-to-follow series of YouTube Glossika Phonics videos to learn from). Pimsleur, on the other hand, does not provide any text.

5. Unwritten Languages / Regional Dialects

Glossika handles unwri<en languages and regional dialects with ease: we transcribe everything so you can both see it and hear it. And again, the phonics are there for every sentence.

Because Glossika solved the problem of unwri<en languages, we also deliver languages as they're actually spoken. Most courses on the market

teach literary Persian, literary Armenian, literary Finnish, and many others. Glossika delivers how the language is actually spoken on the streets, differing greatly from the wri<en word and how most textbooks teach language. Be confident that the language you learn from Glossika will be engaging and easy to communicate with naFve speakers.

6. Spaced Repetition

Glossika Spaced RepeFFon (GSR) audio is unlike any other program. Unlike Memrise, Pimsleur, Anki, Duolingo, GSR doesn't just remind you of informaFon when you're about to forget it, which isn't all that great for long-term memories. Instead, GSR is built to work with your sleep pa<erns and the building of long-term memories. GSR doesn't remind you

--     it builds habits. A[er using GSR, there is no issue of remembering or forgetng, but rather speaking in a way that just feels right, because you do it out of habit. Just like a naFve speaker.

“exactly the language product t h a t y o u ’ r e l o o k i n g f o r … reasonable and humble approach to language learning… ability to be realis:c and honest about the language learning process…”

Brian Powers

Language Around the Globe

“… highly effec:ve, research g r o u n d e d m e t h o d … i t ’s a treasure trove of high quality dialogue material that you won’t find anywhere else.”

Donovan Nagel

The Mezzofan:

“We highly recommend Glossika for those who want to become beEer (and faster) at making sentences.”

“Glossika audio content tested every corner of my brain... and it reminded me of scores of small things I had learned but forgoEen about t h e I t a l i a n l a n g u a g e . . .

G l o s s i k a c o u l d r e a l l y transform your speaking a b i l i t y i n y o u r t a r g e t language.”

Ellen Jovin Words & Worlds of New York

“ I ’ v e a l w ay s a d v o c a t e d learning vocabulary purely in contextual sentences instead of from lists, and Glossika is the perfect resource for doing just that."

Israel Lai

Rhapsody in Lingo

“. . . y o u a r e a b s o l u t e l y rewarded with a rich body of knowledge, not only about your new language, but about the process of language acquisi:on.”

“Every language has certain grammar paEerns... learn these common grammar paEerns, you have a good grounding in t h e l a n g u a g e . O n c e y o u re co g n i s e t h e s e co m m o n phrases... you can cope easily with many familiar situa:ons you’ll find yourself in. In a nutshell, Glossika gives you all this founda:onal stuff on a plate… which is awesome!”

Olly Richards I'll Teach You a Language

“A course I really like for i n t u i : v e l y i m p r o v i n g my knowledge of the gramma:cal structures and vocabulary of a new language… ”

Conor Clyne

Language Tsar

“So if Pimsleur is the alpha of the audio courses then Glossika is definitely the omega... Never has there been such a direct path to fluency than there is with Glossika.”

Jan van der Aa	Lorenzo Swank
LanguageBoost	Language Learning Library	Best Way to Learn German

“ C o m p r e h e n s i b l e i n p u t method... you will get the feel of how to say something correctly.”

Teddy Nee Nee's Language Blog

“Comprehensive and effec:ve system that delivers speaking a n d l i ste n i n g t ra i n i n g t o fluency.”

David Hagstrom

Talk with my Neighbor

“This method is actually a ninja. It will teach you grammar without teaching you grammar and you won’t even know it’s doing that.”

Polyglod

“… a very solid language learning method that should be in every serious language learner’s toolbox.”

Lingholic

“... your brain can recognise it automa:cally...you will be able to keep up with na:ve speakers when the :me comes... What’s Glossika? In 3 words: scien:fic language learning.”

Dave Hale

Find Fluency

“Throughout the course are the sorts of sentences that you actually need to use in d a i l y l i fe … I fe e l m o r e confident”

Wannabe Polyglot

“Glossika speeds up this natural	“I  highly  recommend  (the	“I love it! … seriously. What I
process of exposure and allows	lesser known) Glossika.”	love about Glossika is that you
our ears and our ‘mouths’ to		have put into a concentrated
become  accustomed  to  the		pill what I would have done
language… We can now hear		with  hundreds  of  books
the words, recognize paEerns		myself.”
and  naturally  pick  up  the
rhythm of the language.”

Simon	John McWhorter	Stuart Jay Raj
Dawn of Truth	TED Talk (4 Reasons to Learn	hyperpolyglot
	a Language)

Join the Global Community of Glossika Users Today!

Below we include a step-by-step guide to selecFng your language, and how much Fme it's going to take you to reach fluency. We can measure the results, and we can deliver those results to you with certainty.

If you're looking for a boost in your career, or a promoFon, or a new job in another country, or the opportunity to do business with another country, then where will your fluency be in 3 months from now? 6 months from now?

Do you know for sure? How can you measure your results and how much fluency you have a<ained?

We've figured this out for you ahead of Fme here at Glossika, and we're here to help you reach your goal.

The Hardest Language in the World

We believe that all languages are the same. They all have difficult or challenging aspects, but they also have easier aspects.

The hardest language in the world is your first foreign language. Your second and third foreign language won't be as hard anymore. And your success rate will increase. But you can always come back and give your first language a second shot and break through to fluency.

Choose a Language

If your naFve language is English, and you want to choose the easiest and fastest route to fluency, I recommend any Germanic or Romance language. Some of the easiest languages include Swedish, Norwegian, Afrikaans, Italian, or Spanish. Languages that are a bit more complex include Dutch, German, Danish, French, and Portuguese.

If you'd like a challenge, then start with a language outside of your language family. Later if you learn more languages, they appear so much easier. If English is your naFve language, this would be a non Indo-European language. In Europe and the Middle East there are several you could choose: Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew. And this would include all languages in East and Southeast Asia and Africa and the Americas.

Choose a Schedule

This largely depends on how much Fme you have every day and for how many months you can stay dedicated to your goal. Once you order a course, we will deliver you a detailed schedule to follow.

Glossika Resources

Glossika Blog

Regularly updated with new ar8cles about language learning. Free ebooks are buried among these ar8cles!

Glossika Phonics Channel

Specifically dedicated to the interna8onal phone8c alphabet (IPA) and covers all the symbols and sounds used in the IPA.

Glossika Training Channel

A lot of new videos coming out Fall 2016 on how to use the Glossika method and how to tackle various languages.

Contact Us!

training@glossika.com

Join User Discussion

glossika.com

The Baffler -- David Roth: The President of Blank Sucking Nullity From a-hole to b-hole, Trump explained

On August 12, Trump and the world witnessed armed white supremacists in the streets and an attempted mass murder by an ISIS-preferred method. Over the course of three working days, he figured out a way to get firmly and even defiantly on the wrong side of it all. In a pair of transparently strained attempts at being Presidential, Trump struggled to muster a condemnation of literal fascism on the literal march; he identified the presence of “very fine people” on both the fascist and anti-fascist sides of what is honestly not a working binary, and he reserved the phrase “truly bad people” for the news media, which had been so unfair, so unfair, in their response. By Tuesday, the issue was once again the media’s selective and slanted and dishonest treatment of him. By Thursday morning, Trump was tweeting mournfully about the tragedy of Confederate monuments being removed from public parks. He finally sounded like himself again.
Among the segment of the population that’s put off by things like a president refusing to forcefully condemn Nazi rioters, this has raised some uncomfortable questions about Trump’s beliefs. Does he really share any or many of the beliefs with the racists and nationalists and racist-nationalists who made his campaign their cause, or is this a political calculation against criticizing a small but important part of his base? Was his decision to defend statues of famous slave masters a reflection of his perspective on history, or maybe a darkly strategic reading of the national political mood? Did he not know that what he said was historically incoherent and obviously wrong? It’s right to wonder, but we should be past asking these questions about this man at this point. The most significant thing to know about Donald Trump’s politics or process, his beliefs or his calculations, is that he is an asshole; the only salient factor in any decision he makes is that he absolutely does not care about the interests of the parties involved except as they reflect upon him. Start with this, and you already know a lot. Start with this, and you already know that there are no real answers to any of these questions.
It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him—old, uninformed, amorphously if deeply aggrieved.
There’s a reason for this. Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life. He has no friends and no real allies; his inner circle is divided between ostensibly scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless ones, all of whom hold him in low regard and see him as a potential means to their individuated ends. There is no help on the way; his outer orbit is a rotation of replacement-level rage-grandpas and defective, perpetually clammy operators.
Trump now “executes” by way of the The Junior Soprano Method. When he senses that his staff is trying to get him to do one thing, Trump defiantly does the opposite; otherwise he bathes in the commodified reactionary grievance of partisan media, looking for stories about himself. It takes days for his oafish and overmatched handlers to coax him into even a coded and qualified criticism of neo-Nazis, and an instant for him to willfully undo it. Of course he brings more vigor to the latter than the former; he doesn’t really understand why he had to do the first thing, but he innately and deeply understands why he did the second. The first is invariably about someone else—some woman, there was a car accident, like during or maybe after that thing—and therefore, as an asshole, he does not and cannot really care about it. The second is about him and therefore, as an asshole, he really, really does.
To understand Trump is also to understand his appeal as an aspirational brand to the worst people in the United States. What his intransigent admirers like most about him—the thing they aspire to, in their online cosplay sessions and their desperately thirsty performances for a media they loathe and to which they are so helplessly addicted—is his freedom to be unconcerned with anything but himself. This is not because he is rich or brave or astute; it’s because he is an asshole, and so authentically unconcerned. The howling and unreflective void at his core will keep him lonely and stupid until the moment a sufficient number of his vital organs finally resign in disgrace, but it liberates him to devote every bit of his being to his pursuit of himself. Actual hate and actual love, as other people feel them, are too complicated to fit into this world. In their place, for Trump and for the people who see in him a way of being that they are too busy or burdened or humane to pursue, are the versions that exist in a lower orbit, around the self. Instead of hate, there is simple resentment—abject and valueless and recursively self-pitying; instead of love, there is the blank sucking nullity of vanity and appetite.
This is what an asshole is, and lord knows Trump is not the only one in his business, or our culture, who insistently bends every incident or issue back towards his sour and jealous self. Some of the people who do this even care at some level about the broader world, but because they are assholes believe that the solution to that world’s problems lies in paying more attention to one particular asshole and his or her ideas. Trump is not one of those people. The rest of the world is an abstraction to him, a market to exploit; there is no other person in it who is real to him. They’re all supplicants or subjects, fans or haters, but their humanity is transparently not part of the equation. What other people might want, or indeed the fact that they could want at all, is crowded out of the picture by the corroded and corrosive bulk of his horrible self.
There is no room for other people in the world that Trump has made for himself, and this is fundamental to the anxiety of watching him impose his claustrophobic and airless interior world on our own. Is Trump a racist? Yes, because that’s a default setting for stupid people; also, he transparently has no regard for other people at all. Does Trump care about the cheap-looking statue of Stonewall Jackson that some forgotten Dixiecrat placed in a shithole park somewhere he will never visit? Not really, but he so resents the fact that other people expect him to care that he develops a passionate contrary opinion out of spite. Does he even know about . . . Let me stop you there. The answer is no.

The answer is always no, and it will always be no because he does not care. Every lie, every evasion, every massive and blithely issued shock to the conscience Trump authors will only ever be about him. He will never be embarrassed by any of these things, because he cannot understand anyone’s response to them except as it relates to him. Slavery? That’s another thing that his very dishonest enemies want to blame him for. Racism? He’s been accused of it, and honestly it’s so ridiculous, so ridiculous. History? He’s in the business of making it, baby. Violence? Not his fault. People protesting? He doesn’t know them.
This is the horror at the hole of every asshole, and it is why Trump will never get better as a president or a person: it will always and only be about him. History matters only insofar as it brought him to this moment; the roaring and endless present in which he lives matters because it is where he is now; the future is the place in which he will do it all again. Trump’s world ends with him, and a discourse or a politics that is locked into scrutinizing or obsessively #resisting or otherwise chasing him will invariably end up as arid and abstracted and curdled as he is. More to the point, it’s a dead end. The shame an animal feels is secret to us.

Alex Massie: Trump’s presidency will stain America for years to come

Aug. 15
The Spectator

It is amazing what a crowd – or a basket – of deplorables can do. Sometimes they can even strip away cant and reveal the truth. Such has been the case since a few hundred neo-Nazis and assorted other white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the weekend. They were protesting the planned removal of a statue honouring General Robert E. Lee, a statue typical of the American south’s longstanding emotional sympathy for the Confederacy. The Confederates might have been wrong, but they were romantic and, besides, they were our kind of wrong. Of course they should still be honoured by statues that serve as consolation prizes or participation trophies. America’s original sin endures, you know. 

And it lives in the White House too. Previous presidents have been, if we are coy about these matters, complicated creatures. But Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, to name but two of these complicated creatures, were politicians of substance; men who viewed the presidency as a means to an end, as a way of getting things done. A vehicle for improving the republic. The current incumbent, Donald J Trump, is a much simpler kind of bigot. 

There is no need to be coy about this. If it is unfair to suggest that the 63 million people who voted for Trump are all bigots and racists we may still insist upon the truth that they voted for a man who is. This has always been apparent, from the time when the Trumps were discriminating against black tenants in New York City to the time when candidate Trump was railing against Mexicans and Americans of hispanic heritage during the campaign. 

And it was made obvious, too, by the people he chose to staff his White House. The Steves, Bannon and Miller, and the likes of Seb Gorka are unapologetic white nationalists. And why, for shame, should they apologise for being so when they serve a president who is plainly cut from the same cloth? The Breitbarting of the White House has been a shameful thing to witness. Never before, or at least not in living memory, has the American presidency been so degraded. 

It is no exaggeration to say that Trump is the most ignorant president any of us can recall; ignorant, that is, of everything except his own genius. No American president has known less about American history; none has shown so little appreciation of the work done by his predecessors, nor of his own duty as a custodian of the republic’s virtues or guarantor of the better angels of its nature. Trump is ignorant of everything except himself and sometimes you suspect his knowledge of his specialist subject it itself more limited than you might think possible. 

But why should Trump be expected to take sides in a street brawl between white supremacists and counter-demonstrators? I mean, one of these groups was made up of his people and the other was not. So you can see the difficulty. Even now, shitty takes will be being prepared arguing that it’s somehow liberalism’s fault; that the decent bear responsibility for the indecent. Well, in a word, no. 

Again, not everyone who voted for Trump is a bigot but it is obvious that he performed well in the bigot community. David Duke, like the other goons marching in Charlottesville, had no doubt that Trump was his president in ways Barack Obama could never be. And again, Trump’s staffing of the White House has given Duke and his ilk every reason to believe that the president is broadly sympatico with the aims and values of white nationalism. At no point, certainly, has Trump disabused this constituency of any of this. A man must accept support from wherever he can get it, after all. 

It all represents the shaming of the United States and I think we may now suggest, quietly, that it’s not just a question of economic insecurity. These people wanted to take their country back. To the 1950s, if possible. And in their president they see a kindred soul and, while guilt by association is not always a pleasing or profitable suggestion, in this instance if the hood fits, well, it fits. 

As David Frum, a Republican whose ‘Never Trump’ bona fides need no further substantiation, observed, the president “is always an effective communicator, but rarely has he more clearly communicated who and what he is than he did today”. Quite. It would be sad if it weren’t all so shameful. And embarrassing. 

Meanwhile, I suppose a measure of pity is warranted for those people in this country still clinging to the notion this is a president who is “good for Britain”. Admittedly, that pity should be laced with scorn but there you have it. Even if Trump could plausibly be thought a Good Thing for the United Kingdom, there is something miserable about kowtowing and abasing ourselves before a man so thoroughly unqualified in every way for the office he now holds. Trump’s idea of a deal is glory for him and humiliation for you. And, besides, no-one serious can possibly trust anything he says. 

All of which is to observe that if ever there was cause for allowing Trump the benefit of the doubt, for giving him time to acclimatise to and then grow in office, that time is surely over. He is who he is and that, frankly, has been obvious from the start. If you chose to ignore this – as, to their shame, millions of Americans and too many Britons did – then you were only fooling yourselves. 

Realpolitik demands we accept disagreeable reality but even if we accept it a certain measure of self-esteem and dignity demands we recognise the truth for what it is. Nothing good can come from deluding ourselves or maintaining the fiction that what is plainly appalling is in some odd fashion actually welcome. So it is with Trump and this country’s dealings with his administration. 

If we have it bad, however, we might also spare a thought for Congressional Republicans and, indeed, millions of Trump’s voters. The possibility of redemption is still there for them, but only if they too are prepared to look reality – and truth – squarely in the face. The longer they kid themselves, the longer they maintain the lie that all of this is acceptable or somehow just within the bounds of what is normal, the more they abase and shame and soil themselves. Because it is none of these things and the more fully you recognise this the more thoroughly you begin to understand that it is likely, all of it, to get very much worse before it gets better. 

The sadness is oppressive and so too is the shame and the embarrassment one feels for a great country that has never, at least not in my lifetime, been led by a president whose worldview and every instinct refutes and repudiates the very values he is supposed to embody and uphold. 

It is what it is, I suppose, and that realisation might be the saddest of all. It has only been 200 days, albeit 200 days that feel like years. Shame. Pity. Scorn. Embarrassment. These are the leitmotifs of the Trump years. And they will stain the great American republic for years yet.