Help us improve Clozemaster! What would you most like to see added, changed, or improved?

[mike]

@BanachTarski thanks for letting us know! We’re having some trouble reproducing this issue. In the meantime you should also be able to click and drag to highlight the word - please let us know if you notice any issues with this option.

@Dcarl1 thanks for letting us know! Is it the same sentences each round?

@AlexG71 @sindaco we’re rolling this feature out slowly - it’s currently only available for the 100 Most Common Words and Fast Track collections for Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Japanese. I wonder if perhaps you saw the button while reviewing sentences that included sentences from other collections? Please let me know of course if you think there’s a bug or something else might be going on.

[AlexG71]

Hi Mike, I was doing Polish. Maybe I was doing the 100 Most Common collection when I noticed it in place. I’ll check back. Definitely looking forward to this being available for all the main collections e.g. 1000 Most Common etc, it’s a really useful feature. Thanks for adding this. It makes Clozemaster an even stronger app.

[sindaco]

Thanks for the reply @mike. You are indeed correct, I have thousands of outstanding reviews, spread across all the various categories and grammar challenges, so it will just have been for one of those other collections in Italian indeed. I’m definitely finding it a very useful feature, and hoping it can make its way to more collections/languages

[Dcarl1]

@mike: Not exactly the same, which is a bit of a mystery - but a large degree of overlap from time to time. So some words I may have practiced 10-12 times and some none.

[Siffi]

With languages that uses different writing systems, is/will there be a way to switch on a literal translation in brackets underneath? Just to make pronunciation and translation easier (at least in my opinion)
Such as with Russian:
Привет
(Privet)

[alanf_us]

“Privet” is a transliteration, not a literal translation, so I think you’re asking for transliterations. I can see how transliterations might be useful with a language like Chinese, which uses ideograms rather than an alphabet. But with Russian, they might actually be counterproductive.

Russian is a nearly phonetic language, in which it is possible to predict the pronunciation (except for where the accent falls – I’ll get back to that) of nearly any word from its spelling. The Russian alphabet, with its 33 letters, is very good at representing the pronunciation of Russian words. By contrast, the English alphabet is bad at representing the pronunciation of Russian words. There are some sounds present in Russian that are not present in English, and there are some English letters and combinations that can be pronounced in a variety of ways. Looking at привет, the example you chose, “privet” is not a good representation of the pronunciation because the Russian “e” is pronounced more like “ye”. But “privyet” is not a great representation of the pronunciation, either, for a variety of reasons. For instance, the “y” part of “ye” doesn’t last as long as in English. And how would you represent a word like бык? “Byk”? “Bik”? “Book”?

Many learners of Hebrew, another nearly phonetic language, use transliteration, and I can tell you from experience that it really holds them back. When two letters are transliterated the same, they can’t remember which one to use.

There are really only two tricky things in Russian spelling:

(1) unaccented о is pronounced the same way as а
(2) the letter ё, which is always stressed and pronounced more or less like “yo”, is often written without the dots, meaning that it’s written identically to е, which may or may not be stressed, and is pronounced more or less like “ye”

So the place where the accent falls, which is important in its own right, also can tell you how to pronounce these vowels. That’s why showing the sentence with Russian letters with every stress indicated by an accent mark, and every ё written as ё, gives you all the information you need, while a transliteration would actually subtract information.

[elianam]

Hi Mike! Thanks for asking! Would it be possible to personalize my keyboard shortcuts — the enter button to go to the next step is a bit awkward for me and I’d prefer to use the space button for that.

[Floria7]

@mike After all is said and done, I think you’re doing a grand job already, which is why I, and no doubt many others, chose you and spend more time here than elsewhere. Bye for now:-)

[Bassario]

Hi there,

One option I would like to see would be the option to set the maximum number of reviews higher than 50. I do rounds of 100 sentences and therefore can’t choose to have more than 50% of reviews, this seems a bit illogical.

Thanks in advance for considering!

[volkert]

I’d be interested in some clean up/corrections of sentences:

• For Norwegian - where sometimes there are multiple correct spellings - have these properly captured - especially as I usually put off the green/red coloring for spelling (i tend to put excluded synonyms in the hints - but that does not work too well if the words are close)

• For Romanian - remove all the sentences with people’s names and city names that don’t translate. I have had to enter Boston, Mary, Tom etc. multiple time

• General follow up on corrections - I have reported quite some but don’t think I have actually seen one changed as a result.

• For private collections - an auto translate feature would be fantastic - of course you’d still need to be able correct.
  Furthermore, I’d like to see a way to see how many people are playing collection’s you have created yourself.

[galning]

This is REALLY trivial…could we have a Brit flag?? You’re identifying me as “American” and, while I love our cousins VERY much, I ( personally) like to see which country people are from. And I’m currently an American Imposter!

PS - been reporting a lot of Cloze issues lately and been impressed with how quickly you respond. Well done.

[Floria7]

Ahimè, sounds a bit like the complaints on Duolingo. Have to say, the flag doesn’t worry me at all. With all that Cloze offers, I’m just glad to be a member here and am quite happy to sport an American/English flag next to my courses. There’s always the option to pop our country into our profile to avoid any confusion. Sorry if I sound unpatriotic, I just haven’t thought much about it, too busy rounding up my Renewals

[volkert]

Personally I’d like also fixes in the Romanian course - there’s some number of sentences where answering the correct answer is counted as wrong. There is of course a workaround - adding the correct answer in alternate answers. Fixing would be better of course. I also notice this is also happening quite a bit when adding your own collections

[alanf_us]

@volkert

For Romanian - remove all the sentences with people’s names and city names that don’t translate. I have had to enter Boston, Mary, Tom etc. multiple time

For what it’s worth, in Romanian, sentences containing “Boston”, “Mary”, or “Tom” constitute about 20% of the total number of sentences in the Tatoeba corpus from which they are collected, so getting rid of them would have a significant impact on the size of the collections, and changing the names would take nontrivial effort. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worthwhile, of course. I find the overuse of these names a problem in Russian, another language in which proper nouns are declined.

[MsFixer]

@volkert
As for the first three points, Clozemaster is not the primary contact because Clozemaster’s content depends heavily on external sources.

Re: #1 (multiple correct spellings), you can add “alternative answers” as many as you want simply by editing the sentences.

Re: #2 (unique nouns such as “Boston” and “Tom”), the problem is the frequency lists. The FAQ page articulates that CM refers to the frequency lists suggested by Wiktionary. Your Norwegian course refers to three different lists, one of which is based on OpenSubtitles.org. My Indonesian course also refers to the OpenSubtitles list, and the quality is low – it contains so many words from English movies and TV programs. If you want Clozemaster to remove English words (i.e. not written in your target languages) or unique nouns from your course(s), firstly you need to mark such improper words on the frequency lists, and sent them back to Clozemaster.

If you don’t have such time for comprehensive screening, just push the “ignore all” button.

Re: #3 (correction reports), you need to directly report to the sentence source, i.e., Tatoeba.org. Once Tatoeba corrects them, Clozemaster can download the latest version from Tatoeba and can update the courses. I used to report errors to Tatoeba, but I found the people on Tatoeba (especially admins and corpus maintainers) lack of knowledge and just wasting my time. So, I decided not to touch the source and gave up. Rather, I modify improper sentences on Clozemaster by myself and/or push the “ignore” button so that the improper sentences don’t show up anymore. You can also create your own collections by correcting the original sentences or by creating new sentences from scratch. You can find the step-by-step instruction on creating collections here – thanks to sindaco!

@alanf_us
I’m afraid you misunderstood volker’s point. Using “Boston” and “Tom” in sentences are totally okay, but they should not be asked to fill in the cloze exercises. For example from the English course, “Tom and Mary went to the same school in Boston” is a quite useful sentence to teach you English words such as “went”, “same” and “school”. But volker was bothered by exercises asking to fill in “Boston” or “Tom”.

[alanf_us]

@volkert

For Romanian - remove all the sentences with people’s names and city names that don’t translate. I have had to enter Boston, Mary, Tom etc. multiple time

If you want to skip all the sentences that have clozes with a particular word, you can use the “Ignore” button and select the “Ignore all” option. This is only an option for Pro users.

[simias]

I don’t know if this is the right place for bug reports but there’s something wonky with the focus in the “EDIT SENTENCE” menu: if I add a note for instance and press the “enter” key I expect it to trigger the SAVE button, but instead it removes the sentence from reviewing:

I think it’s a regression because I only noticed the issue recently and I often add notes. This is using Firefox 96.0.2.

As far as features are concerned, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has a lot of difficulty with some specific entries more than others, those words that just won’t stick in my brain. I wish there was a way to tag these words (either manually or maybe automatically if I fail them a lot) and then they would have a more intensive review schedule. Like every day for a week for instance. Probably not the right formula but I’d be curious to know what the other users think.

Beyond that I want to say that I really enjoy clozemaster, it’s become the centerpiece of my daily language learning routine.

[morbrorper]

@simias

if I add a note for instance and press the “enter” key I expect it to trigger the SAVE button, but instead it removes the sentence from reviewing

I can confirm this. “Remove from review” is a fairly new feature, and this is probably a side effect.

@simias

wish there was a way to tag these words […] and then they would have a more intensive review schedule

I have been thinking the same, that the system should be able to figure out which words are giving me most trouble and make me review them more often. Isn’t that what computers are for?

[hooetvee]

It looks like there’s now an option to remove a bunch of sentences from reviews at once (in “Manage X”) but it doesn’t do anything. It would be great if it would, I really dislike those over 10 000 reviews I’m seeing.

[ogingero]

Be able to add nikkud (diacritics AKA,vowel points) to improve the Hebrew pronunciation. Which has a lot of problems because there are none, at all. The English equivalent would be to see words like - bass or read - is it base or bass? Red or reed? (Now imagine those words writen as: bss and rd. IS IT bass, base, boss, bess? Red? Read? Rod? Rad?)… Humans can guess by context, bass or base… Computers can’t… but ta da! That’s the Hebrew pronunciation using TTS without vowel points. (I imagine this an issue in other courses too. We should be able to do transliteration - for tts to read in settings).

Also other versions of cloze sentences, and games! would be good.

(And a crowdsourcing fix for those awful translations. The Hebrew course sounds like a 19th century woman (trying to do feminist Shakespeare) wrote them (of therefore present who hath doth proffered his headgear? Types of sentences) - I’ve heard the Turkish course was partially done by an antiSemitic religious nut. Some of the English sentences also read like they were written by a semi-literate English speaker (we kan haz foodies?)

You must know this is a big complaint. So the last suggestion -clozemaster PRO can create a collection, but can share it with an invite link… (or let scrowdsource vocab/sentences for personal collection… ) we are starting a language book club. We’d like to use clozemaster, but not everyone involved has pro).

And adding collections makes your offerings look larger,
Some languages are really sparce to begin with - they don’t even have the option of reading 19th century cloze ramblings! (Welsh and Yiddish have less than a 1,000 clozes each, most are multiple lines/ridiculously long - like this paragraph I just wrote)