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

One small addition that might be nice for the leaderboards is when you check someone’s profile if it showed their sign up date. Like the person I see with 5 million points, did they sign up 3 months ago? 6 months ago? 7 years ago? Would be nice for having a small way to compare my pace maybe. Thanks!

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Yeah, I agree. Maybe your date of the first cloze. It would be cool to see a display of ‘Started [date]’ may help people see how much they’re learning.

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Oh yeah, I love Papiamentu and would be thrilled to see it. All the coolness of a Romance language and none of the pain.

On a related note, I’d like to see Interlingue (Occidental) added. We’ve contributed over 5,000 sentences to Tatoeba over the years and I imagine that should be enough, and I could do an overview of the existing sentences to correct any errors, since it’s by nature a second language for everyone and each user has a differing level of ability.

Edit: here are all the Occidental phrases on Tatoeba so far.

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This actually brings up a good point for me - it’d be nice if the Fluency Fast Track was on a bit softer of a learning curve so that it weighted “easier” words (i.e. words from the more common groupings) to show up more often early on rather than dunk you right in with anything and everything. This would allow Fluency Fast Track to be a nice “auto-learn” mode rather than a “trial by fire” test of discipline and brute force.

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What I currently would MOST like to see added is:

for each missing word in HSK collections of Mandarine Chinese (which are a pro feature by the way!), scrap the requirement “At least 75% of words in each sentence are at the HSK level indicated.”.

Every collection up to HSK4 isn’t impacted by this. So by the time the user reaches HSK5 and HSK6, he’ll already love the app and won’t bother more complicated sentences (which at this stage are useful anyway).

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The number one improvement for me would be to make the reporting of my activities (starting on a new language pairing and leveling up) to my followers voluntary; with today’s automatic and compulsory reporting it feels like constantly having Big Brother breathing down one’s neck.

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@mike Several months later, still happy but still not able to use Speaking. Have checked everything possible but no go. Otherwise I am more than happy with everything as it is and look forward to logging on every morning.

Thanks and best wishes to you and the team.

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I’d like to be able to see how many people have used my shared collections. Thanks!

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When I double tap on a word to make it the cloze, it defaults to including the following space in the cloze. This makes the card nonfunctional. Thanks!

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@BanachTarski: I have seen something similar when a word is followed by a double quote, but not with ordinary spaces.

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I would LOVE to see a random play option for “Favorites.”

As per an excellent suggestion from a fellow user I have grouped my mastered words there to play in a different format, so I can test my recall as well as listening skills. However, I seem to be getting the same handful of favorites playing over and over. It makes what I am trying to accomplish less than effective.

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A few weeks back I noticed a “new” feature (first time I’d noticed it anyway) on Clozemaster whereby a new button had been produced, after a sentence had been answered, which gave a word by word grammar breakdown of the target language. However, this button has recently disappeared. Is this coming back? It was really useful. Apologies in advance if I’ve missed any separate discussion this elsewhere in the forum.

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I had also noticed and appreciated it, and then noticed recently it seems to have gone missing again :frowning:

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@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.

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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.

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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 :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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@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.

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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)

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“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.

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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.

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