Hello Clozemasters!
We just released version 2.6 of the mobile app along with updates to the website! Wowee this was a big one. Thanks for your patience while we updated. If you’re having trouble with the mobile app, please be sure you’re using this latest version.
As promised, here’s a list of the biggest changes:
- Cloze-listening is now available for all Clozemaster-created collections in 30+ languages.
- Pro users can download all collections in the mobile app.
- Everything is now a “collection” of sentences, so users can now review, favorite, search and manage by collection.
- The Fast Track collection is capped at 20,000 sentences, while all other collections are capped at 10,000 sentences.
- Pro users can now edit sentence translations as well as add notes, hints, pronunciation, and change the percentage mastered after answering, when searching a collection, and at the end of a round.
- There are a maximum of ten sentences with the same missing word per “Most Common Words” collection.
- No more run on sentences! There is now a 300 character limit per sentence.
- Users can now review, favorite and search sentences in the Grammar Challenges.
- Collections you create have their own reviews and favorites, and count towards your overall score and leaderboard ranking.
- There is no more “Unknown” collection within “Most Common Words” collections – we’re aiming to move those into “known” word frequency collections.
- Review intervals are now only by date.
- We added a Fast Track and Most Common Words collections for learning simplified Mandarin Chinese from English and moved the HSK collections to Pro only.
The most notable change might be a change to your statistics – the number of sentences you’ve played, mastered, and favorited as well as total number of sentences as listed above. Here’s the rationale. The change is an attempt to:
- Improve quality – a lot of users were reporting that there were too many sentences with the same missing word and unnecessarily long sentences.
- Improve feasibility – we realized a Fast Track of greater than 20,000 sentences is daunting and unnecessary and simply too much for most users. 20,000 sentences is already the equivalent of reading the first Harry Potter 3 times, and by that point you’ll likely want to move on to native-level reading material.
- Be able to offer downloadable collections in the mobile app so you can now play offline.
If you notice any discrepancies with your Fast Track and Most Common Words progress, here’s how those were updated: previously when a sentence was played on the Fast Track, it was also counted in a Most Common Words collection, but not vice versa. This didn’t seem right (why not vice versa, and why not across Grammar Challenges and other collections). So during the update the progress was split – if the sentence was played on the Fast Track, the progress was counted there, otherwise it was counted in the Most Common Words collection.
We’re open to any and all feedback of course – our primary goal is to help you get fluent faster.
Lastly – a big thanks to users LessPaul, _blck, Tycho, Mercurylingua, akorl, AmyJean, Adrianxu_, Fluksje, hannaheberz, bringebaersyltet0y, Expugnator, char1210, malcoolm, MateHun, Koeppchen, alanf, Rosi, Danniiboy, Tamara_eM, telseth, Lingua, blogscot, punk, Marcos, mamushi72sai, dot20, jdm, chguldemir, TETR1S, and mbet1093 for all their help with beta testing. Thank you!
That’s all for now. With this big update out of the way we can get back to adding more languages and features more frequently (like learning Cornish from English which was just added today).
Thanks for playing and happy language learning!
Mike and the Team at Clozemaster
In general I am happy with the updates. One thing I do find annoying: When learning in Listening mode providing text input, the cursor focus is not actually on the text box. This means I have to hit TAB after listening to every sentence instead of just start typing the answer.
Using Chrome on a Mac.
Thanks for letting us know! This should now be fixed.
The korean section is now a mess
Thanks for letting us know! Korean should now be fixed. Please let us know if you’re still seeing any issues.
Hi guys,
It looks like you’ve broken the word order for languages with right-to-left ordering like Hebrew when the missing word is either first or last in the sentence. The cursor in the gap is also stuck to the left but that’s a less critical issue.
Thanks for letting us know! The right-to-left ordering should now be fixed while playing on the web. We’ll get it updated in other places as needed as soon as possible.
There is also a significant improvement in the dark theme on the website. A few days ago, it was way too high-contrast because the text-box (in manual input mode) had a white background, which was hard on the eyes against the rest of the page’s black background. This has been fixed so the text box now has a dark background like everything else.
Also, the dark theme was extended to the dashboard as well, instead of only when you were in play mode.
Hi there!
I’ve been using the Clozemaster website for a while now and I’ve come to like it a lot! There are a few things that stuck out to me immediately that I didn’t really like. For example, I don’t really like the “Level Up!” pop-ups in the middle of the lesson, I liked it better at the end. I also liked the old “Round Complete” screen better than the new one. I think the “Sentences” section could be more compact as a sort of drop-down menu. I also noticed that the “Round Complete” sound effect is much quieter than the other audio. These are pretty minor details and there’s a lot of stuff I do like, but those are just some of my suggestions so far; I’m sure it’s just me over-reacting to change and, eventually, I could come to like these things. Thank you so much for an awesome website and I will definitely consider upgrading to pro!
Nice update. I like the new look and the features I have explored so far. There are two things I miss, however, or perhaps I overlooked them?
1. In the old version, I liked just using the “Review” button and it seemed like it selected the items that were due for review for me. Now I have to select which Collection to review. I am not fond of that.
2. I really like the expanded leader boards, but I can’t seem to locate the “Following” filter.
I’m using the Android app mostly.
Thanks for the feedback!
1. A number of other users have reported the same. We’re working on a solution.
2. The “Following” filter is only available on the web at the moment. We’ll get it added back to the mobile app in an upcoming release.
Anything else just let us know. Thanks again!
One more bug. When I’m doing the review and get to the Round Complete screen with no words left pressing Enter triggers the same screen again instead of returning to the Dashboard
I liked in the old version that when I got a typing question wrong, it would show the answer and let me type it in a blank box. Now, the answer is already in the textbox as text when I get it wrong so if I want to type it, I have to hit backspace a few types. A minor problem but it’s kind of annoying, especially being used to the old version.
I’m confused about what the character limit on sentences has to do with anything. A run-on sentence is a grammar issue. It has nothing whatsoever to do with sentence length.
(Knowing this sort of thing off the top of my head is part of my day job.)
Hi again –
Now that I’ve been using the new version for a while, a question and a comment remain:
1. I like that we can edit sentences and their translations. My question is if these edits are just for my account or if everyone can see them? Polish has a fair amount of errors and this would help me know if I should submit corrections via the red flag for the worst ones.
2. One feature I miss is that when I started to spell words in the old version but could not get to the end of the word, I could hit the multiple choice button and compare the correct answer to the attempt I made. This is handy when trying to spell tricky words in Polish and Russian, which for me are many – heh heh. With the new version, once I hit “multiple choice” the box where I was making the attempt disappears so I can no longer make the comparison.
On the whole I am enjoying the new version, especially now we can “Review all.” Thanks.