I am just curious has anyone finished fluency fast track in their language?
Has anyone 100% completed fluency fast track?
What about most common words?
How many hours did it take you? Do you feel like it’s helped move you closer to fluency/proficiency? It’s my goal to complete clozemaster one day; but I estimate it will take me probably 2-3 years.
I basically don’t expect to, due to the review cycle.
I am working quite slowly (20 new + 40-120 review a day), and using this as a listening and grammar supplement.
Like @Dcarl1 I too got snowed under by reviews. I gave up with the Spanish from English clozes mainly because the new words were appearing so infrequently* that I was no longer retaining anything. Now I’m working on English from Spanish using multiple choice to work through the much smaller number of reviews I’ve built up. Maybe in a couple of months I’ll be finished.
* I had tens of thousands of reviews built up as I was doing both the fast path and the slow path which seemed like a good idea when I started.
I am actually very close to finishing the Spanish from Swedish FFT, but that’s only because it contains no more than 3571 sentences. 
Interestingly, I have played about as many sentences in the Spanish from English FFT, which is a mere 17% of the total 20000. But I started the latter course before the introduction of the FFT, which means that I have quite a few sentences in the Most Common Words collections adding to my review queue, so that I will most likely never finish before I get too old for learning. And then I have a considerable number of other language pairings that I foolishly started before I knew any better. ;(
I think one possible way to handle the review problem is to have even more fine-grained control over review intervals than the HARD, NORMAL, and EASY buttons.
I doubt that I’ll ever finish probably because I don’t really want to, and I go slow but sure. I keep my Reviews healthy and dance between Multiple Choice and text, Listening (the hard one) and Favourites and pleeeenty of Grammar. Very happy!
I’d like a button that says ‘NEVER SHOW ME THIS AGAIN’. Obviously, this message is too long for a button, however, if the button had a symbol somehow indicating ‘DONE’ with some hover text that might be a practical option.
Similarly, if a learner is working through the Most Common Words, as they progress it’s likely that wanting to see the early sections, e.g. 100 Most common words, is no longer useful, so perhaps, being able to mark a section as ‘DONE’ may help prevent the mountain of reviews from building up too high.
– Edit –
Apparently, it’s already possible to ignore the Most Common Words on a page by page basis - I’m not sure how useful this if each section has hundreds of pages. Perhaps, this button could be repurposed. Alternatively, it occurs to me that an additional button could be added to suspend / enable individual sections.
There’s someone here who had completed the Spanish FFT in not too ridiculous an amount of time, perhaps around a year or so. He had let his reviews build up, so while that probably feels demotivational to most of us, I guess that does get rid of the redudancy, especially when having erroneously set them too shortly (I have played sentences from this messed up period 10-20 times each easily, and that for thousands of sentences).
It’s a bit hard for me to estimate, since so much of it is affected by the review intervals and your overall playing/reviewing style/approach, but I think it might take me 5-7 years before ever completing only FFT. But that’s also because I haven’t exclusively focussed on it, I’ve dipped a lot into the grammar collections and Most Common Words colelctions too. Even so, it’d be years, even without focussing on other collections I reckon. I’m currently at 30 % playing, 26 % mastered after about a year (with some overall inactive periods).
I do concur with @morbrorper and @blogscot that some more fine-grained controls would be very helpful.
Ideally I would really like the following features to be implemented:
Any time you are presented with a cloze word, even if it’s the first time, I’d like to be able to have shortcut buttons to select 4-5 options (rather than just easy - normal - hard). Where I envision them as follows:
For most words I know immediately at the first or second time which of these they fall into, and waiting to reach 100 % Mastered, in order to be able to set not very fine-grained controls on the then re-repeat interval doesn’t make much sense. I know I can manually set these things (and I do that currently, for about 95 % of the cloze words), but that is a lot of effort, it should just be a simple press of 1 through 4 or 5 from the start of seeing the cloze, which I think could help prevent so much of the unneccessary review pile-up too.
Ideally I would love for the above system, or even the current playing/reviewing system, to be customisable to: The first time I play a sentence, use Listening mode. The second time I play (first review), use Vocabulary mode. […] For e.g. > 75 % Mastered sentences, use Speaking mode.
And indeed, another feature I would really love to see implemented, is the possiblity to just apply e.g. 100 % Mastered to entire collections at once (e.g. 100 Most Common Words), like already mentioned.
I should also mention the demoralizing effect of having the number of non-mastered review sentences lumped together with the number of recurring long-term review items. It would be great if it were possible to handle the two categories separately.
I keep my reviews to under 500, ideally under 100. I am working slowly so not too overwhelming yet.
Spookily, I have literally just completed the Italian Fluency Fast Track. It’s taken me just over a year with a few other bits done here and there.
I won’t pretend that I have truly mastered every word, I have to resort to multiple choice on occasion. Plus some sentences are bizarre!
Hi David, did you complete the fluency fast track one time, or 100%?
How do you feel about your language skills compared to where you were when you started?
Right now my reviews are over 2800. It doesn’t bother me. I set the reviews for 100% to a longer interval, I do mostly reviews every day, and I don’t master very many cards every day, so my 100% cards won’t build up super fast.
I sped through the most common 500 words, so I have all of those to review now. I only do 5 cards a day from that set. 99% of them are very easy for me.
I agree that it’s a good idea to separate cards that are 100% mastered from the rest of them. I understand how that could be an issue as you progress.
Hello Vito,
Yes, I have “mastered” 100%, not just the first run through.
I’d say it has helped my understanding and vocabulary a lot. In particular, it’s been very useful in helping me with the imperative, the subjunctive and the use and position of clitics. The passato remoto is also much in evidence, though of course opinions will be divided on how useful that is!
My reading and writing has improved, my listening and speaking skills are very much a work in progress! Fluent I am not!
I’m always slightly puzzled by people being worried about how many reviews they have built up. I think mine were over 17000 at one point.
Now on with the other Cloze challenges which have mostly been neglected.
Currently, I’ve got 58,000 reviews in my Spanish from English. The problem I had was I’d got in to the habit of gaining 10,000-13,000 points everyday. As I already had a fair amount knowledge of Spanish before I started Clozemaster, reaching this daily target initially wasn’t too difficult. As you might expect, over time I started learning unfamiliar words, phrases and expressions so it became gradually harder and more time consuming. When I started getting into the 50,000 Most Common Words ranges I found myself spending way too much time reaching my target and was gradually getting burnt out. So, I changed tack.
Next, I started studying a mixture of easier and harder clozes so that I could reach my daily target (obviously by this point reaching my target had become more important than actually learning the language). However, as I mentioned above, I found that I was seeing the new words so infrequently that I was no longer retaining anything - plus you’re not going to meet uncommon words in wild that frequently either. So, I stopped and tried something different.
Nowadays, I given up on trying to reach a certain number of points each day, but instead set myself a target in terms of a number of sentences to study each day in each of the (now several) languages I’m studying. If I get on the leaderboard isn’t a priority, just an added bonus.
I’ve been doing the Fluency Fast Track until I’ve covered all of the words up to 20,000 Most Common on the Fast Track Stats pop-up window. For Italian this equates to 57% of the total Fluency Fast Track and is just over 10,900 sentences.
I might at some point come back and do the next group from 20,000 to 50,000, however the coverage is low at this level (in Italian for example, the 5,117 sentences are only 17% of the 30,000 words that would be in this range). The words and sentences are still undoubtedly very useful for practice, but I don’t necessarily think that this particular 17% of those words (which are to some degree determined by GuyBrush88) are the most useful for me to memorise.
Therefore, for my version of the Fluency Fast Track (only up to the 20,000 Most Common words), I’ve “finished” FFT for Italian and French, both from English. I already knew these languages to a reasonable level (I used to live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland), and so I used multiple-choice for a very large number of sentences (probably more than 50%).
For Italian and French then, with the above caveats, the “More Stats” window shows that my Time Played on Clozemaster was about 100 to 110 hours to get to that level.
A better picture of how much time in Clozemaster it takes me to progress can probably be seen with Portuguese form English. This is a language that I didn’t start learning until some time within the last 2 or 3 years. With Portuguese I still do have a great advantage in that it is a romance language, and shares a lot in common with other romance languages that I know, as well as sharing the same rich set of cognates with English just like the other major western romance languages.
So with Portuguese from English I can learn 1,000 words up to 100% mastered in 15 hours of playing Clozemaster. This 15 hours does include stopping to look up words in online dictionaries, adding hints and notes, adding words to custom collections for additional practice, and then carrying out that additional practice. The breakdown is 5 hours to go through the first time (which includes of all of the looking up / adding hints and notes / adding to custom collection), then up to 4 hours to learn the more difficult words, and then 3 x 2 hours each to do the reviews to get up to 100%.
For German this is a much slower process !
The reason that this is quicker in the romance languages is that (for me) approximately 60% of the clozes are words that I can enter correctly the first time, sight unseen. Some of the many reasons that I can get these correct first time include:-
Of the remaining 40% of words, more than half are also ones that I can pick up by playing the cloze only 2 or 3 more times (e.g. irregular verb forms where I know the root verb, cognates with slightly unexpected spellings etc.).
Then of the original 1,000 words I would normally have about 100 to 200 that I have to put some real effort into learning by repeatedly playing the clozes in the custom collection.
I could make this quicker by just setting the word to mastered if I enter it correctly first time (it would probably save around 3 to 4 hours per 1,000 words), but I feel that would be cheating. In any case, one of the great benefits of Clozemaster is making my brain think about everything that’s in front of me, i.e. it isn’t just about the cloze word, it’s also about exposure to lots of different sentences.
I’m sorry that this doesn’t tell you how long it takes me in absolute time, but I don’t know if that’s what you want to know because we all have different amounts of time available to play each day/week (and I haven’t actually completed a full FFT, and Italian and French are languages that I was already familiar with). Therefore, I thought I’d give some insight into how much playing time it takes for me to progress instead.
I’ll add a separate comment on the 100% mastered and EASY/NORMAL/HARD issue.
I also set the 100% review interval too low to begin with (60 days if I recall) before slowly pushing that back. I didn’t mind seeing the mastered sentences again after this 60-day period, I was more bothered that I would then see a cloze sentence again at most 120 days later (by choosing EASY) when I was now quite happy that I didn’t need to it for a long time. This was the motivation for me to push my 100% mastered interval out to 180 days.
The review intervals that I’ve now set up are therefore 1,1,3,9,180.
I’m not really happy with the 180 day interval as I would like something shorter to catch those words that I hadn’t really committed to memory, or that still caused problems. However, because the EASY/NORMAL/HARD intervals are tied to the 100% mastered interval, I’ve had to set the 100% mastered interval to something so that the EASY option pushes easy clozes/sentences a long way out into the future.
I agree with the point raised by @morbrorper that more fine-grained control of the review intervals for 100% reviews would be very helpful.
I would like customisable intervals for the EASY/NORMAL/HARD buttons, and in addition I’d like them to be unrelated to the interval for the first time that an item is 100% mastered. So for example I might then choose to have the normal intervals as 1,1,3,9,60, with HARD/NORMAL/EASY intervals of something like 15,60,3650.
As mentioned by others such as @blogscot, there are some sentences that I am comfortable not seeing again and so either a “Don’t show me this again EVER” or very long interval option would be helpful. However, I also have the opposite problem for those sentences where I’ve found a cloze to be hard (but I still was able to get it correct, as opposed to just not knowing it at all or making a mistake).
If I have found a 100% mastered item to be hard then I want to see it again soon, and waiting for half of my 100% mastered interval until I see it again is too long. As I don’t have any other option, my current practice is to set to it to 0% mastered so that I can see it again soon [I started by setting it to 75% mastered, but I now use 0% mastered because there’s a keyboard shortcut for that].
I’d also like to be able to choose whether EASY, NORMAL or HARD is the default. When going through these reviews of 100% mastered items, I am constantly hitting the 3 key for EASY, with the vast majority being in this category. I personally would like to have EASY as the default, but I appreciate that other people might prefer to have HARD or NORMAL as the default instead. A customisable option would be great in my opinion.
I’ll put together a feature request and post it separately, so that people can add comments.
I have a question about the “brain” and the “check mark” features. The “brain” marks the sentence as known-100 % mastered and next to review 2100. The “check mark” sets the sentence to 100% mastered and gives me a date as of today to 2122-11-14. Both dates are far enough for me to never see them again ( that what I want). But it is not what happens. My current review is such that I never have reviews I do not want to see. By playing the so called “new sentences” I see the old ones again and again. The very exact sentences I know and seen many many times. New supposed to be new. Right? Sometimes I feel like swimming through molasses. What is the best way to “kill” the “known” sentences so they do not impede my progress? Is “ignore” button really the way? What am I missing here? It is hard to get to that “finish line” when you are running inside the hamster wheel.
This looks very strange; is that the effect of setting the 100% date to “never”?
@barcarolle and @morbrorper. Just out of interest, set to “Never” many of my sentences “100% mastered” or “known” are then set to various dates in 2100; one “known” just now gave me “2122.11.11” (UK 11.11.22). It seems to vary.