I am using Clozemaster for learning Spanish and the settings were automatically in English, which is fine. But now I see that I can also use Clozemaster in Dutch, my first language.
But the difference in number of sentences is big.
English to Spanish, 500 most common words has almost 3000 sentences and the 1000 most common words has about 4000.
From Dutch to Spanish, 500 most common words has about 1700 sentences en the 1000 most common words has around 2000.
What should I do?
As the words/sentences get more difficult it is easier for me to learn from Dutch to Spanish, but won’t I miss out on words since the English version has so much more?
You don’t have to decide. You can learn Spanish simultaneously from Dutch and from English, by doing both courses. ![:slightly_smiling_face: :slightly_smiling_face:](https://forum.clozemaster.com/images/emoji/apple/slightly_smiling_face.png?v=12)
That way, you’ll improve your English too if you’re not yet as fluent as you’d like to be. Thanks to the Dutch/Spanish pairs, you’ll understand the Spanish sentence even if you don’t understand the English sentence, and that way you simultaneously “learn English from Spanish”.
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@DelicateMeadow3977
I definitely recommend you to work on the Spanish course from English on Clozemaster for three reasons: (1) indirect translations, (2) popularity, and (3) error handler.
(1) Indirect translations
Many of the sentences sourced from Tatoeba.org are translated from English to other languages. In other words, many of Dutch-Spanish sentence pairs are so-called “indirect” translations. “Indirect” on Tatoeba is like a brother-sister relationship. For example, a sentence is translated from English (parent) to Dutch (son) and from English (parent) to Spanish (daughter) separately. It doesn’t always guarantee you that the indirect Dutch (son) and Spanish (daughter) pair is correct especially when the English (parent) can be interpreted in multiple ways. Therefore, Clozemaster’s language courses from non-English inevitably contain more mistranslations due to the indirect translations.
(2) Popularity
Popular courses such as Spanish from English and Italian from English are more frequently updated on Clozemaster and offer us a wider range of question types/collections. You would miss such opportunities if you worked only on the Spanish from Dutch course.
On top of that, sentences sourced from Tatoeba often contain errors. Popularity directly impacts on the number of available peer reviewers on Tatoeba. Therefore, errors in unpopular language pairs (e.g., Dutch-Spanish and Arabic-Vietnamese) are often left unfixed and imported from Clozemaster.
(3) Error handler
Clozemaster started fixing errors a couple of years ago. However, some unpopular language courses don’t have error handlers. Suppose that a user found an error in a Spanish sentence from English and reported it to Clozemaster. The Spanish-English error hander fixes the error only in Spanish-English even if the same Spanish sentence is used by Spanish-Dutch, Spanish-French, and Spanish-Chinese.
My native language is Japanese and my target language is Indonesian. I played both the Indonesian course from English and the Indonesian course from Japanese on Clozemaster. I have reported hundreds of errors in Indonesian-English and the error handler fixed most of them on a weekly basis. But I’ve never seen the same updates applied to the Indonesian-Japanese course.
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