+1,250,000 points in a single week

Well, @quedate_en_casa has surpassed 1,250,000 points in a single week, that’s 178.571 points per day on average. That’s INCREDIBLE! I don’t even know if that’s possible but if it is @quedate_en_casa has been really dedicated to clozemaster this week. I won 800k points the week I did more tryhard, so 1,250,000 is such a big and scary number.

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It is incredible. The most I’ve ever done in a day was about 65,000 points and that was very tiring!

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Hmm, having had a look at that user’s list of languages, they’ve earned a quite lot of points from hardly any sentences played for many languages. Reviewing the same 5 or 10 sentences over and over again is an interesting way to pass your time…

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Yeah I have also noticed that. :confused:

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Agreed that does seem a bit fishy. :fish: :thinking:

With being able to set the max review interval to 1 day, that means you’re able to re-master sentences and score the max points everyday. This doesn’t seem right.

One option is to have the interval double every time you get an already 100% mastered sentence correct - so say you have the max review interval set to 1 day, you master the sentence, it’s due tomorrow, you get it right again, now it’s due in 2 days, right again, now it’s due in 3 days, then 4 days, etc. (number of times correct when mastered x max review interval).

I’m not sure this option makes sense for larger max review intervals - for example 365 days, then 730, then 1095 - that’s a long time. And everyone uses Clozemaster differently, so there are likely cases where you do want sentences to come up for review everyday.

Curious to hear if you have any other solutions in mind. Thanks for pointing out this issue!

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I don’t think you should be able to earn maximum points from the same sentences every day, but also don’t think long review intervals should double just because you get them right. Getting a sentence correct if you use the colour hints or multi-choice or the listening function doesn’t mean you truly know the word and could generate it without prompting.

Someone pointed out once that for language pairings with relatively few sentences, unless you set your review intervals shorter than the standard ones, you’ll run out of sentences to practice.

It’s a difficult one!

I look forward to hearing other opinions.

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I believe the point is not getting rid of daily reviews. You can have daily review set but you won’t necessary play the same sentences again on the same day, not on large decks for sure. Even so, that’s still a lot of sentences to go through, hundreds and thousands, and that is legit language practice. I have got excellent resources for my Norwegian through being able to review those sentences. The Norwegian-English deck is short and I quickly ran out of sentences. Having the sentences spaced at a normal SRS interval is not what I needed, not so much because with time the exercise serves for different purposes. I start with practicing reading skills and move on to writing and full recall. My Norwegian went from A2 speaking and B1ish reading to B2 speaking and C1 reading, and the shift took place when I added Norwegian to my pool of daily reviewing, after having mastered the deck. That was just some months ago, and that was exactly what I needed to make some vocabulary stick which I had seen through so many textbooks and novels and series through all the years I’ve been studying. I’ll probably stop when I notice it gets too easy, like memorized, but it hasn’t been the case.

As for some very short decks, I like to have all sentences ready but I just play some 40 a day.

When you play a sentence you don’t just study the cloze word, but the entire sentence. Every time you play, there is a different detail.

I think what is being exploited here is the possibility this user has of going through a really short number of sentences, over and over again. Even if we set the review interval higher, they will just delete the deck and add again and quickly master the chosen sentences over and over again. This can be confirmed because the deck Kadrian pointed out to me as being subject to that practice was no longer part of the user’s list of decks when Mike went on to check. This all happened within a couple of hours.

So this is the workflow: user adds several English-based decks, regardless the source language; they quickly go through the easy words, adding up 60 points per sentence as kadrian pointed out; the next day they can do sentences with the same easy, short words in another English-whatever language deck, and delete over and over again, even within the same day. This is the weak spot and where serious language learning is being affected, in my opinion. You restrict their reviews in English-Vietnamese? No problem, they’ll delete and add the deck again or do English-Bulgarian.

What would help could be a limitation as to how often a user deletes, re-adds a deck, I mean, maybe not even a direct limitation, just a limitation on how it affects its scoring. Or a checking process that would make them lose time and miss the point in doing so. If the user is out for scoring and not for studying, that is where it should be addressed. Similarly a limitation or a warning as to how many identical sentences or sentences with identical cloze words could count towards the score.

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Trying reply for the First time. Hope it works.

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It does. Welcome to the forum!

Hello friends of rankings. I have to say Good-bye. It is time for me to stop using clozemaster as kind of video game and not as an app to learn a language. 4 weeks passed by and I did nothing else than gathering points and hardly learnt one single new word. This will end now.

Bought a house in Spain 5 years ago, retired last year and now I spend several weeks or months in Spain every year. But what a pity! Of all the mayor languages of Europe Spanish is the only one I cannot speak.

People are very, very kind here and always try to help by talking English. But I do not find it adequate to live in a country without speaking the language of the population. So I started class in July last year, but after two lessons summer break began until octubre; and after some lessons quarantine began in Spain. That was the moment I booked Clozemaster. I had time enough to study every day, did Not understand why I earned points and did not understand why I got 2,4, 8, 16 or so. Then saw a leaderboard (Spanish). As for me, I really do not need points for learning, but I worried about the fact that I learnt 8-10 hours a day and did not get a corresponding number of points. By and by I discovered the secrets of the App, differing percentage of mastering words or changing Review intervals. And then I found the Internet site of Clozemaster with an all-time leaderboard (Rank 3000 or 5000 for me) and every week the Same Person winning the weekly Leaderboard. So I watched him and others what they were doing, Most of them were „learning“ about 20 languages, hardly to Imagine. When I copied this Strategy, I soon learnt that it did not make any sense at all. And received an email from Mike, that I learnt an „impressive lot of Language pairings“. Some days later you started a discussion whether it was possible to gain 1,25 million points during one week.

The clue is a quick finger (or a keyboard with C/R and Paste-Function) and a short interval of reviews. And : a l o t o f t i m e. I watched your speed, 3 or 4 times 36 points within on single second is an excellent rate. I can only compensate for this with more time.

These were interesting Four weeks of gathering points, but now I Return to learning Spanish.

Ah, meanwhile even Adrianxu_ reached 1.000.000 points, a number he could Hardly imagine 1 and a half week ago.

Hope you all have a lot of fun. For me it was an interesting week. But now back to Spanish vocabulary. Bye and have a nice time on Clozemaster (I love the App)

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Well, I hope you can learn Spanish now. And yes I reached 1M points, I decided to tryhard this week. I have spent a lot of hours per day.

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You can still earn quite a lot of points while effectively learning the language, you probably just have to slow down a bit! I’d suggest using text input wherever you can, doing a mix of vocabulary and listening, increase the audio speed for listening to the maximum you can understand, and to make it harder, turn off the translations so you really have to study the meaning of the whole sentence and not just translate the cloze word. If you find yourself going into autopilot mode and answering without really having thought about the sentence, the new functionality that lists all the sentences at the end of each round is very helpful to go back and review.

For myself, I’m trying to get in the habit of repeating each sentence out loud. Clozemaster has helped me a lot to bring my aural comprehension of French closer to the level of my written comprehension, but my speaking skills still lag behind. (I know I need to practice more in real conversations, but just saying more sentences should help, I hope!)

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Getting a sentence correct if you use the colour hints or multi-choice or the listening function doesn’t mean you truly know the word and could generate it without prompting.

I’m a teacher with over 20 years experience and I completely disagree with all of this. For one, it’s very ableist. It’s also just unfair to the reality that people study differently and there’s nothing wrong with that.

An example of this is how I have chronic hand injuries in both hands from being a musician, and poor eyesight due to other health problems, and without the color hints I would give up on this app because I make so many typos and the color hints help me catch them and correct them. This is one reason why I quit using Duolingo, because their app is so unforgiving with typos. For 6 years I begged Duo to help those of us with disabilities that impair typing with this, and they never would, so now I’m here.

Second, human beings are not machines and our intellectual performance can vary wildly from day to day. The idea that we have to perform consistently to demonstrate knowledge is just not realistic and is one way language learning circles marginalize and alienate people who have more burdens on their mental energy, which could be anything from having children, to having a difficult job, to having a disability, to having to put up with discrimination in their daily lives. I got a lot on my plate IRL and some days I’m just not at my best game. Hell, most days I’m not. Some days I will blank out on how to spell words I know and have typed thousands of times, like dìochuimhneachadh or menyenangkan, and it has nothing to do with my knowledge of those words, but about me being a human being with an ever fluctuating physical and psychological state and how that impacts my brain and memory at that moment in time. I mean, people blank out of how to say and spell things in their native language all the time and no one ever interprets that as a symptom of poor or incomplete learning.

As for the listening feature, I use that as a specific activity in my study, to improve my ability to connect phonology to writing. It’s not necessarily easier–and as someone who has used the listening feature a lot, I can tell you it’s a lot more time-consuming. So to think people are going to use that has an easy way to rack up points fast is just silly, and to tut-tut is some kind of crutch is to dismiss how it can be genuinely valuable in learning one’s language more deeply.

As for multiple choice, people earn half the points for it, so if they want to use it, fine. I know sometimes I just get sick of typing, maybe my hand pain is getting bad or I’m just bored with it, and so I switch to multiple choice. I still get to spend time on my languages so it’s win. Also, one thing I found which courses on which I had been exclusively doing text input was when I started switching to multiple choice from time to time that it made me be more attentive to clozed words that had gotten too routine for me when I was just doing text input. Sometimes a little change in the routine is good.

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Ok, I’m going to maybe burn some bridges here but I’m done with this nonsense.

Expugnator, would you care to explain to everyone here why it is that you are #1 on the Indonesian leaderboard by over 1 million points, when you have played fewer sentences than either the #2 person or me (#3)? As I recall, in your log on LLORG, you said sometime ago that you were doing text input with the first set of common words over and over. And I know you had to have been able to rack up a lot of point without really progressing through the sentence decks because I’m doing that course and you’re always way ahead of anyone else week after week.

I personally don’t have an issue of you doing this course this way. My problem is you’ve been doing this with this course, and probably other courses as well, which is likely how you are at the top on the Everyone leaderboard every week, and then you go around on multiple forums and social media outlets and raising suspicion about other people who, as far as I can tell, are doing the same things. You’ve made yourself a fixture on all these online spaces as the Clozemaster Guy and use other people’s respect for you to cast doubt on seemingly anyone who threatens your standing on the leaderboards here. I’ve been watching this go on for months and it’s just so unsavory.

I don’t think you’re a cheater. I honestly don’t care how you use this app. I don’t care if being #1 means this much to you. But I do think you need to stop trying to police other users here and stop trying to influence the Clozemaster team to your favor. Let it not go unnoted that you got to the top of the leaderboard using the app this way and here you are making suggestions that would make it harder for anyone else to catch up to you. That’s the sort of thing that will drive users away. In fact, I suspect it already has.

Ok I’ll just assume you’re on a bad day, Ceid.

I don’t care about the Indonesian leaderboard at all. It doesn’t account for much of my points at the main leaderboard either. What I noticed specifically with Indonesian is that the words aren’t evenly distributed according to real frequency, at least to the usual textbooks. So what happened was that I was having a hard time making even the early level word stick, because as a matter of fact they weren’t the easiest words in the language for me. So that’s why I decided to review these first 200 words on a daily basis until I started to get used to them. Like I wrote somewhere else, I don’t learn the cloze word alone, but rather the entire sentence. I can only say that it worked to some extent but being a totally beginner in a non-Romance language is not the same as doing Spanish, French and Italian where no matter what the sentence I will always get to understanding it but for the cloze word or a couple ones more. So I don’t think I’m cheating by studying over and over again the sentences I’m still uncomfortable with. As a matter of fact, only when I manage to come up quickly with the word do I feel that word starts to become part of my active vocabulary. It is the repetition that consolidates and activates vocabulary for me, and I can notice how much I improved in my Norwegian and Esperanto because of that. I think it’s way different from what the user about reported, the one who starts doing English-random language decks only for the sake of earning points.

If you want to have me removed from the top of the Indonesian Leaderboard, go ahead. I won’t learn difficult words I’m not prepared for yet just to be fair with this specific issue. I always do study new words - I’m currently at the fifth level - through multiple choice before mass reviewing through text input. I restrict these to 4 rounds of 10, which considering there is reviewing corresponds to some 20 new words a day, which is a reasonable number to aim for in a new language.

I have learned a lot but I know the real learning will only take place when I’ve seen these words enough to be able to type them quickly and earn both visual and muscle memory, so that’s what I’m doing now, I’m preparing them for that. Sometimes I do play the second level as text input but it’s still a burden for me and so it misses the point of gaining volume, repertory. I prefer studying new words through multiple choice then, though I suspect reviewing through multiple choice also helps the case and that’s what I did a couple of times.

As for my stronger languages, before there was the option of reviewing per levels I’d review only randomly. I thought that option had gone with the Random Play as well. Last week Adrian gently pointed to me that it’s still available, so back to random review I am.

If I have lots of words for reviewing it’s because I’ve played a lot of words in the past. We’re talking about years of daily study here. I won’t refrain from reviewing what I think will still do good to my language skills just because you think it’s unfair. I have evidence of this - the Norwegian deck has only 9k words and after seeing these words over and over again I do hundreds of reviews and it’s working for me. I don’t see the same words over and over again within a day because I don’t run through the entire deck. That’s the value of having them displayed randomly. I was doing per-level reviews and it’s really a waste of time for stronger languages - including Norwegian which has become a strong language now, much of it thanks to reviewing at Clozemaster - so I’m back to random reviews.

As a matter of fact, I only start reviewing for a day after I’ve gone through new sentences for all latin-script languages (or reviewing weaker languages with short decks - or do you think that “mastering” a Norwegian or an Esperanto or an Estonian sentence after playing it right 4 times means the same?). I don’t have the discipline to do the same for the non-latin script words on my phone, so that’s why my Greek and Russian could have been much better - but I did improve them.

So I think there is a sharp distinction as to I am doing. I’ve never claimed to be the Clozemaster Guy, I just like to share the possibilities it has brought to my language learning. I have learned a lot from it and I expect to start my next languages with a solid background earned only through Clozemaster study, a shortcut gained through short spurts of study on a daily basis that sum up to learning a lot.

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Thanks to you folks for an honest and intriguing thread, exploring aspects of the site that had eluded me. And, while Quedate… may already have left the house, I wanted to say that s/he might well earn the prize for the cleverest ‘handle’ during COVID…

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Respect, Adrianxu_!
+229000 Points in just one day (24h) are a remarkable start to a record-breaking week. Keep on running. Depends on family, friend, employer and above all concentration, but I’m sure 400,000 a day are within reach - theoretically. Go on, you can do it.

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Wow, that’s a scary number. I wonder if it is possible to retain all the knowledge that the number has provided.

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Thanks! I won 60k in 2 hours from 2am(when leaderboards start here) to 4am. And then I played it for the rest of the day. I want to do as much as possible the days I stay at home since I won’t be at home much this summer.

You can, but most of these points are from reviews so you won’t learn new words.