Hello all! I am brand new here. I was working on the top 100 dutch words and it seems to be the correct answer is always the shortest. It really is hurting my learning because thats something I can’t ignore. It makes me cheat lol
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Welcome 
(or should I say “welkom!” 
)
Interesting observation, I’m curious about it now, I will have a look!
If you’re not an absolute beginner, you might want to choose “Text input” as a method, instead of “Multiple choice”, this way you’ll actually have to type out an answer. You can make it easier by enabling text hints (the letters will turn green if they are correct) and enabling having the input text box correspond to the answer length.
Anyway hopefully the correct answer always being the shortest has just been a fluke at the beginning and you’ll enjoy your language learning journey.
If you have any questions about the workings of Clozemaster in general, just ask!
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@mike, I can confirm this is true in the vast majority of the cases. Not sure how it works in other languages, but wouldn’t it make sense to let the all multiple choice options shown be from the top 100 list? There were many very advanced words given as multiple choice options, thus indeed making it tempting to just choose the easiest word, without even paying attention to the rest of the sentence, and thus not necessarily learning much in the process.
I also noticed “otis” featured as an option twice, but this is not an actual word. Searching for it consequently also doesn’t yield any results. Even on Tatoeba I can only find 3 sentences containing it, in English, which refer to a Miss / Mr. “Otis”, but that is with a capital “o” and none of those seem to have been translated into any other language, let alone Dutch.
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I hadn’t noticed this because I rarely do multiple choice; about the only time I do is if I’m using speaking practice on the app where there is no option to play the sentence audio, and I just can’t remember what the word is.
I took a look at it in German (where short words, especially nouns, are rarely in fashion 
) and found this pattern in two sets of 10 clozes in the 100 Most Common collection:
Set 1
Shortest word is correct: 5/10
Shortest word is NOT correct: 2/10
There are two words of equal length, one of which is correct: 3/10.
Set 2
Shortest word is correct: 3/10
Shortest word is NOT correct: 2/10
There are two words of equal length, one of which is correct: 5/10.
However it’s worth remembering that there will be a limited number of short words in some languages (other than articles and the like; I’m talking verbs and nouns), but those short words often form the cornerstone of a language. However, the fact that there are (relatively) few of them means that there will be relatively fewer short words to offer up as alternatives. It’s understandable that the early lessons will have little choice but to pilfer longer words from the larger lexicon for the alternatives, so it will be more COMMON for the shortest word to be correct… but far from universal.
Let’s compare it to, say, Italian’s 50,000 Most Common collection. (I’m not kidding myself that I’m anywhere near ready to do that in German yet, so I have to mix and match a bit.) The same test yielded:
Set 3
Shortest word is correct: 1/10
Shortest word is NOT correct: 8/10
There are two words of equal length, one of which is correct: 1/10.
So the further you go on, it makes sense that this phenomenon will become less common since there is a greater number of longer correct words. I don’t think this is really a systemic issue, so much as it just being the way the cards fall in the early collections.
Of course, I could be wrong…
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Thanks for that info and hard work!
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