This has happened multiple times for me recently in the German course. Recently, a sentence was modified and it now reads:
Ich brauche dieses Klebeband.
Previously it used a different word, I think Kassette. I had mastered the sentence (i.e. it was at 100%) but now it has changed, and it is using a new word that I had never encountered before, and did not know.
I think it’s fine to leave a sentence mastered (or at whatever percent it was at) if the word itself does not change, and if only a minor change is made to the sentence, but in the case that the word itself changes, I think it is important to reset the sentence back to 0% because the users have never actually learned the word in question.
I also am a little unclear as to why some of these changes were or are being made.
This particular change is kind of poor, in my opinion, because the sentence in question doesn’t make clear from context what meaning of the word “tape” is wanted.
“Klebeband” means tape as in, the sticky stuff, like duct tape or adhesive tape. “Kassette” means a cassette tape. It would be ideal if a sentence were chosen that made clear which meaning were used, such as something that referenced recording something onto a tape, or using tape to seal something.
The original sentence here was not great, but the new sentence changed the word (and introduced this glitch of not resetting it to zero) but without addressing the shortcomings of the original sentence. So…this whole thing kinda has me scratching my head, like what is going on here?
I’m also not sure why the change was made, perhaps in response to reports here on Clozemaster?
I can’t seem to find the sentence as such (neither with Klebeband, nor Kassette) on Tatoeba.
What source language are you using for your German course here?
There is this following English source sentence (“I need that tape”), for which only one German translation has been provided (“Ich brauche dieses Band.”). From the logs in the sidebar, it doesn’t look like that sentence was changed in any way at any point, nor were other translations of the English sentence unlinked.
Now of course the translations could have happened via another language, but I still should have been able to find them with a search. I even only searched for sentences with “Ich” (exactly) + “brauche” (exactly) + dieses (fuzzy, to allow for different genders of the word potential “tape” translation too), and scrolled through the various pages, but didn’t find any corresponding German sentences.
I’m still surprised there’s indeed not more diversity in the translations of the English source sentence, which could easily lend itself to the various interpretations, like you say. Which is fine, that is the point of Tatoeba, and also here you would get the sentences with the various meanings as different translations. The fact is, there just don’t seem to be alternative translation options provided yet for some reason.