Let me start by saying if Clozemaster wasn’t a good tool as-is, I would not have spent 90 days accumulating almost a half million points. What follows are suggestions for improving an already good tool, and not intended to be a harsch critique.
A few basics about me and my goals: I’m learning German, and there is a huge corpus of material (182 thousand plus sentences). I am working through the FastTrack using almost exclusively Text Input because I want to learn endings, as well as get my foot in the door toward putting words in my active, rather than passive vocabulary. I have spelling color and typing hints turned on, word length turned off.
The Review Forcast is all but useless for planning. The number of tasks appear to reflect not the words that you can practice that day, but instead the number of words that will come due on that day, with a cutoff time that shoves many of them to the next day.
Due to the nature of things, sometimes my FastTrack word shows up in an idiomatic sentence that does not really teach me the word. When I then IGNORE that sentence, I would like the option for it to be replaced from another with that word from within the corpus.
Probably my biggest issue is with questionable or outright bad translations. For example: “Es gab ein lautes Geräusch …” the hint/translation is “There was large sound …” It should be “There was a loud sound …” It is beyond the scope of reasonableness that Clozemaster can correct all 180K + sentences. However I would like to be able to enter my own translation that would appear along with the one provided. (A super-duper feature would be an option to select from other user’s personal translations, with possible promotion to default if enough people select it)
I would like an additional hint option that would provide the first letter of a word when I’m trying to locate the correct synonym. (Right now i type a/delete, b/delete, c/delete etc till I get a green letter.)
I’d like to be able to see the entire leader lists in order to better set goals. (For example right now I’m shooting for #100 on the all-time German list, but I’m not exactly sure what the magic number is — probably about 500,000.
I want to be able to override the automatic promotion/demotion of an answer. Say I just got one right, but I really don’t feel it should be promoted nor go back to 0%. Or I get one wrong but think that it maybe it should go from 100 to 75, not 100 to 0. (In a wishes-come-true world I would want to true SRS, but this would allow me to make the judgements myself)
Those are my biggest issues, not in any particular order. I’m currently a “PRO” user, and intend on renewing next year, even if all stays just as it is, but it never hurts to ask.
This is great! Thanks for all the feedback, and thanks for subscribing to Pro! 1 (Review Forecast update), 3 (editable translations), 4 (first letter hint), 5 (full leaderboard), 6 (change the % mastered) are all in progress and should be released within the next few months if all continues to go well. I’ll let you know once a beta version of the release is available so you can try it out before we roll it out to the main site. Subbing out a sentence on the Fast Track will take a bit longer if doable. Any other feedback please feel free to let me know. Thanks again!
Apologies for late response, but I would love to try the beta — much thanks!
One additional minor feature I would like would be to see the learned status of words while doing reviews. Again thanks for the reply.
I think I am somewhere around half a year of membership, first as a free member, but now as a Pro member. There are some tools mentioned in this review that I don’t use, but for those that I do use, I would agree in content with this review. I only differ in terms of, lets say, intensity.
For me, the “questionable or outright bad translations” is dead-on correct, but I would also add “misleading”. These all are of such an annoyance that I will probably not review my Pro subscription. I used to think that if I either commented or flagged as incorrect those sentences that I know to be wrong, that something might change. Perhaps I am not looking where I should, but nothing seems to change. I am now contemplating to just hitting the ignore button on these sentences to avoid the irritation. This seems wrong.
Let me add that I am using Clozemaster for two languages in two very different ways. The first is to learn a “new” language as I do with Spanish; the other is to become better at Danish, a language that I am, at least for a foreigner, fluent. I understand and accept that my suggestions for Spanish may be wrong, but I pretty much know that I am correct when I flag something wrong in Danish. I flagged a sentence in Danish back in October of 2019, and it is still wrong. What’s the point?
I like the suggested idea to “override the automatic promotion/demotion of an answer”. I think it’s cheating and a bit counterproductive to declare that I’ve mastered a sentence by simply answered it enough times. As I’ve gotten more familiar with the tool, my usual approach now is to make a problem sentence a “Favorite” (odd name that) and change the mastery to 0%. It works, but I wonder if there are better approaches.
I do have one suggestion. Unless I’m missing some configuration option, I want to turn off the sounds. The Spanish speakers are OK but not really helpful; however, the Danish speaker is awful and quite unhelpful. I like to listen to music while I study, but it’s not possible when using Clozemaster.
What now seems to happen in French from English at least is that if someone reports an error, the sentence disappears from the database entirely. I don’t like that because there were some highly entertaining sentences I’d had interesting discussions with native speakers about in the forum, and now they’re gone. I’d rather have those sentences back even with the translation imperfections. I stopped reporting errors because of this.
What we really need are fluent moderators for each language who can make corrections.
We’re working on changing the error reporting such that the sentences are no longer removed from your queue automatically - rather you can ignore them after reporting if you’d like. Agreed on moderators - work in progress!