Explain feature broken - still giving literal translations

Bug Reports
#1

I/we received no response to the previous request to change back the format of the Explain feature, so I’m now opening this as a bug.

Please read details of the request/bug in the following post -

There were several other people who commented on how much they disliked the change - @Floria7 @SpringPaper @James_24 @Spielratte - and there were other people who hit the “like” button on the suggestion to revert back to the old explanations, including very prominent contributors to this forum such as @alanf_us, @Daniel42 and @LuciusVorenusX amongst others.

There has been no response over the last six weeks from anyone at Clozemaster on this topic.

This has had a significant effect on my language learning. I have not studied Turkish on Clozemaster for the past two months as I don’t want to pollute the database with these sub-standard explanations. Now I could generate my own explanations outside of Clozemaster using an LLM, but that would be such a waste. One of the benefits of the Explain feature is that for future users there is no need to regenerate the explanation, and also the explanation is instantly available (no need to wait while the LLM generates the tokens).

I therefore decided to study other languages while this issue was being addressed.

I have now started to find the same problem in Spanish as I reach levels where I want to supplement the readily available Wiktionary and Google translate information with an LLM explanation on some sentences. At the higher levels, for many sentences the explanations have not previously been generated and so I am once again reluctant to press the Explain button for fear of polluting the database.

Please address this as a bug that needs fixing, or else please educate us all by giving us evidence of the research that you have come across that says that providing these literal translations is a better strategy than the older form of explanations.

5 Likes
#2

Hopefully @mike has seen my many positive Reports after using the original, excellent Explain feature which really is a must-have.

1 Like
#3

Thank you for stepping up to ask for transparency. I began studying German on Duolingo and saw it go from thorough and excellent to simple and ridiculous in no time at all, once the changes began.

2 Likes
#4

Do feel free to schedule a feedback call with me on this if you’d like to share more details on your experience. Please know that we haven’t been ignoring you. We’ve released a further 2 iterations of the explain feature since your initial feedback.

The current iteration is that by default the explanation opens up with the individual words with the simple translation but you can now open up the detailed grammar explanation for each by tapping them.