With very few exceptions, I haven’t found there to be too much repetition in the French Fluency Fast Track. You need quite a bit of repetition to get comfortable with new words, particularly longer ones like “se débrouiller” and “verrouiller”. I really like seeing the same words appear in different contexts.
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Agreed, the Fluency Tracks are fine. But I think Mike was talking about the Most Common Words groupings–which I agree are bloated with repetitive words. Depending on your personality, that could be a good thing but I found it a bit extreme to see a word 15 times. If they were idiomatically different, that would be great. Often that isn’t the case.
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I haven’t spent much time yet in the Most Common Words groupings, but now that I think about it, you’re right. Maybe they should be set the same as the Fluency Fast Track.
I agree with your comments about the lack of interaction of the user base. Few people seem to look at this forum.
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Hi, if this comment refers to me, I can only apologise if it appears that I’m monopolising the threads, as this is not my intention. I’m not creating the threads in the forum on purpose. The forum threads are automatically created when I leave myself a note within the app, whilst working the sentences, so unfortunately I don’t have any control over the automatic posting within the forum.
Once again, I can only apologise if this is proving to be a nuisance to other users. Perhaps the developers could tweak the app so that any sentence notes only appear within the forum for the target language and not under ‘Latest Posts’? Or alternatively the automatic posting to the forum of sentence notes could stop entirely?
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No, no, no. Forgive me; that’s not what I meant at all. On the contrary, it’s incredibly refreshing to see people leaving notes and communicating.
What I meant is that I’m really surprised by the lack of “interaction” among our user base. In my mind there are only two reasons for this:
- The users here are more introverted than users of other language-learning apps/sites.
- The UI of Clozemaster doesn’t facilitate interaction.
I believe it’s mostly #2. Please note this is not meant to be a jab at the wonderful developers and staff at Clozemaster–it is achieving its intended purpose of building vocabulary through context and repetition. And it does a pretty good job at that. It just lacks in promoting discussion–the ability to comment is an after-thought and is not polished as if it were a key feature.
Ideally, I think comments should be integrated into each sentence (meaning they are displayed after submitting your answer, and you have a very quick opportunity to like/heart/thumbs-up or ask questions of other members without ever having to leave your study session). And since Reddit, in my opinion, has the most simple yet effective layout for discussions–that style would probably be optimal. Currently, you have to click the comment button, and a pop-up displays so you can input your comment, then you have to hit close to return to your session–these are two unnecessary clicks to open and close the comment function which only promotes to keep the discussion feature tucked away.
I just think it’s a little strange that if I run into a sentence I either think is wrong or I have questions about… I have to go google and search for discussions on other sites to find an explanation about a piece of grammar or a word’s significance in certain contexts. To me, we should be doing that within the Clozemaster app as a community so these ideas are readily available. It only enhances your learning.
I also think we run into a problem compounded by volume, though this is by design. The more sentences I see, the less I want to comment on a particular word in a particular sentence because I know out of the hundreds of thousands of sentences nobody will stop to take interest.
Just food for thought and ideas for future versions of the app.
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Hi Mike,
Thanks for sharing this and I can understand the reasons for capping the number of times a Cloze word is repeated. If I may, I would like to add a few thoughts to this …
- My chosen target language is Polish. As you may have seen, I’ve spent many an hour adding numerous sentence notes on the app to help my learning process, as well as hopefully help other users. When purging the sentence database, would it be possible to exclude sentences that have a sentence note ‘attached’ to them?
- As well as learning the Cloze words in a sentence, I also try to learn any new words (to me) in the sentence as well. If numerous sentences were purged, I’d be concerned about losing touch with associated vocabulary that I’d learnt as a byproduct of a Cloze that had been repeated numerous times. Does every word which appears in any sentence on CM then appear as the Cloze word in another sentence? If so, then this would not be an issue.
- Connected to my last point, a word may sometimes repeated but it might have a different meaning or nuance in another context, or when used as part of a set phrase, or idiom. A wholesale purge might lose the ‘richness’ and complexity of the target language’s database offering on CM. This may not be a problem for a beginner but it could be for any intermediate or advanced user.
I’m not sure what the best solution would be. The app currently allows the user to exclude sentences themselves and to choose the fast track version if they wish, which cuts out the ‘fat’ of the whole available database, if they so wish. Maybe it is better to allow the user to customise the database themselves, either with the current tools the app has, or enhanced ones?
Thanks!
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Allow moderators to more easily resolve reported errors. We really want to focus on improving sentence quality.
Why not appoint some trusted users, who have high proficiency in the relevant languages, as extra volunteer moderators to correct errors? (Not me as I’m not proficient enough, but many others are.) I just did a round of the French Fast Track that had two glaring errors: “boullir” for “bouillir” and “comfortables” for “confortables”. They’ve been corrected on Tatoeba, but are still wrong here. Even I could fix errors that are this clear.
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I suggest @kalzem for a French moderator. He / she is a native speaker who has helpfully responded to the French-specific questions I’ve posted on the forum.
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Haha thanks @kadrian
If indeed there is a moderation feature on sentences, I would gladly like to help for the French language!
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Duolingo demonstrates that there’s huge potential to harness volunteer labour to improve programs like this. The Duolingo French moderators are excellent and they’re all carefully chosen volunteers.
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I think the reason is rather that the forum is only open to paying users, not to everyone. Surely, this is set to make paying for it more attractive but since Clozemaster is certainly a lot smaller than Duolingo for example and a lot younger, the paying community just isn’t that large yet.
Probably, it would help to open up the forum to everyone, or at least some categories/basic functionalities - or a limited number of topic creations per month - to make it more frequently utilised by more users.
And I certainly agree with @Kalzem and @kadrian, we need community moderators (would be happy to support German-learners :))
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I also think the forum should be open to all users. It is just too quiet otherwise, and probably will be for a long time unless something is done differently.
To me, the fact that you get unlimited listening sentences with a paid subscription is enough to make the cost very worthwhile. I cheerfully paid for Clozemaster after using it for three days and usually use the listening function for an hour or more a day. By comparison, I’ve never become a paid user of Duolingo, despite having a 1,398-day streak, since there’s no additional content or functionality for paid users except not having to see ads.
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This is all excellent feedback - thanks!
We are indeed working to add support for moderators. @Kalzem and @dlobok I’ll reach out to you soon if you are indeed interested.
Part of the reason for keeping the forum for Pro users only is to help with quality control.
What do you guys think of making the sentence discussions separate from the forum? In this way we’d have the forum just for discussions like this and other language learning topics. As is I wonder if all the sentence discussion posts drown out post like this.
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Hi Mike, yes, I totally agree with keeping the sentence discussions posts separate. As per my earlier comment, I’d suggest that the sentence notes don’t appear under ‘Latest Posts’ and only appear within the specific forum for the target language, or even not at all, they could just appear against the sentence itself but still allow the moderator access to all sentence comments, for quality control reasons. Cheers
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Does Duolingo have much trouble with quality control given that their discussion forums are open to all users? I’m not aware that they do, but it’s possible that moderators are deleting posts before I see them. Especially if you appoint some community moderators, I don’t see quality control as a big reason to restrict use to paid users only.
I’d be happy to see the sentence discussions moved, but I like being able to easily access the comments on the French sentences, so I wouldn’t like them not to appear at all. I often learn something from the discussion, especially when native speakers clarify things.
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From what I can tell on r/Clozemaster, full of free Reddit users with no link to a Clozemaster account, the worst of it is the occasional meme which can be funneled into a humor/off-topic section.
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I really had DuoLingo waste a lot of my time, the threadsd were a mixed blessing.
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Well Karab, basically I have spent my time practising languages with Clozemaster, the error rate is high enough to generate queries for intercambio friends, partly this is due to lumping English & Spanish in as one language.
The facts is, I wasted an awful lot of time with DuoLingo because they tempted you into comments on the question and/or getting involved in the forum. Feedback to them was totally wasted as they introduced a horrible new system which made the app unusuable and negative customer response was supressed.
Perhaps a button to discuss a translation/thread would be useful. As it is, I’ve reported some very obvious errors between German & Spanish for instance, but often ones that Google Translate might well be prone to (informal singual/plural you and formal you confusion for example; it’s almost as if stuff was just translated to/from English with Germans and Spanish taking different descisions).
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Haha I may be guilty of posting memes on the Clozemaster discussion pages from time to time!
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Part of the reason for keeping the forum for Pro users only is to help with quality control.
I find the Forums here a blessed, spam-free oasis compared to other sites I frequent. Opening it up would be a disaster I am afraid.
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