Apologies if this has been answered before, I searched the forum but am still a bit confused.
What’s the difference between the common words, fluency fast track and JLPT fast tracks? Are they all completely different sentences, or does doing 1 track mean it also completes part of the other? I have played both fast track and common word sentences and haven’t noticed the % completed go up in the other section, but not sure if that’s because I just didn’t happen to learn overlapping sentences
For context I’m on JLPT N4/N3 level in Japanese and at around A2 in Korean - essentially I’m curious to know what the best tracks are for these languages, and whether I should do all the tracks or just focus on 1 per language.
There is a third possibility: a sentence might appear in more than one collection, but playing it in one collection does not mark it as having been played in another. This is generally the case. However, the new fluency track collections (which do not yet exist in every language) were constructed so as to avoid containing sentences already contained in the old collections.
Clozemaster uses the database of the Tatoeba project as source material. Volunteers upload sentences and translate them into various languages.
JLPT is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. It’s an exam for non-Japanese people that you need to take if you want to work in Japan.
The most common words collections take all the sentences available from Tatoeba. That’s with what I would start. It shows you the same word in multiple contexts and therefore really drives home the meaning(s) of the word. Showing the numerous different contexts of a word is one of the main advantages of Clozemaster over its competitors, and why people like Clozemaster so much. It’s also a lot of repetition, which can be good or bad. Repetition is necessary to learn a language, but it also means your progress is slower if you constantly repeat words you’ve already seen rather than moving on to new words. In our age of shortened attention spans and instant gratification, it seems more important to many to quickly fill the progress bars in order to gain a false feeling of progress than to actually retain the knowledge they acquire.
For the impatient, there is the Legacy Fast Fluency track (at the bottom of the web page). It removes a lot of the repetition by not showing you the different contexts of a word. It’s designed so that you see every word only exactly once. The word doesn’t even have to be a “cloze word”. As long as it’s part of a sentence you’ve seen, that counts. I think you miss a lot when you do the Fast Fluency Track instead of the most common words collections, and therefore don’t really use it.
The Legacy Fast Fluency track, like all sentences from Tatoeba, has problems. What if no volunteer at Tatoeba has created a pair for your source/target language? Say, you’re a Spanish speaker and you want to learn Finnish, but there is no direct translation between Spanish and Finnish. But there is between Spanish and English, and English and Finnish. Lots of sentences on Tatoeba are indirect translations, and a lot of meaning can get lost in translation. That’s why the new Fast Fluency track was created. Rather than taking the unreliable but free work of the volunteers at Tatoeba, Clozemaster paid native speakers to create Clozemaster’s own dataset that meets their standards. That’s the Fast Fluency Track (without the Legacy prefix).
The Fast Fluency Track contains all sentences from the dataset that Clozemaster paid native speakers to create. Maybe it’s missing words that are tested in the JLPT, maybe it contains words that aren’t required for the JLPT. If you want to study specifically for the JLPT, there’s the JLPT dataset for that. Unless you want to actually take the JLPT or have already finished all other options, I wouldn’t practice the JLPT track.
To summarize: You can choose between four different datasets, depending on your goals:
the most common words (sourced from Tatoeba, with all it’s problems) with lots of repetition
the Legacy FFT (sourced from Tatoeba, with all it’s problems) with no repetition
the new FFT (Clozemaster’s own database instead of Tatoeba’s database) with no repetition
the words tested in the Japanese Language Proficiency Test
I would do them in that order. To be clear:
Start with the most common words collections.
If you realize you dislike the repetition, do the Legacy FFT (at the bottom of the page) because the new FFT is still a bit beta/unfinished and has its own problems.
If you notice there are a lot of weird sentences, possibly resulting from indirect rather than direct translations, move on to the new FFT.
If you feel fluent enough to practice for the JLPT, do that.
