I want to pivot to more common words, but my queue is getting in the way

Clozemaster Questions, Suggestions, Feedback
#1

Hi, everyone. In two months, I’ll be going on a trip during which I will be spending a lot of time with Russian speakers. I want my conversational Russian to be as good as possible by that point, and I’d love it if I could use Clozemaster to help me. However, the queue that I’ve built up over more than six and a half years of daily practice on the site is, paradoxically, getting in my way.

For quite a while, I have been favoring sentences with less common cloze words. However, I’ve come to realize that, as valuable as it is for me to know these words, I need to focus for a while on more common words, which I need to be able to recognize and produce faster, and with fewer mistakes. For years now, I’ve been clearing my review queue every day and only adding a small number of new sentences (mostly not from existing Clozemaster collections). I had been hoping that the length of the review queue that appears every day would shrink. It did, slowly, for a while, but it has been growing again (also slowly). The result is that I am now seeing 100-110 review sentences every day that are not getting me significantly closer to my immediate goal and are preventing me from doing practice (either at Clozemaster or elsewhere) that would help me more.

As far as I can know, one person can only have one account here (though I’ve never verified that), and that account can only contain one review queue per language. The review queue is segmented in the sense that the interface allows us to play the sentences from different collections separately. However, if you have played sentences from many different collections over time, your review queue will contain only one or two sentences from collection A, another one or two sentences from collection B, and so on. If you play sentences by collection, you will often only have a single sentence in a round. This means that you will see it again immediately if you get it wrong the first time, so you won’t be giving your memory a workout. Thus, the only practical option is “Play All”, where you have a single queue that mixes sentences from all your collections.

I don’t have a problem with the sentences with clozes that I’m able to get right. I mark them as “Hard”, “Normal”, or “Easy”, or even “100% Known”, and their reviews keep getting pushed down the road, which is what I want. The problem is with sentences with clozes I don’t know and don’t care much about for the moment. I can and do mark them “Ignore”, but that means that I’ll never see them again (unless I were to comb through all the “Ignore” words, which I never intend to do), and it seems wasteful to have gone to the effort of accumulating these sentences only to throw them away, effectively permanently. I’d much rather be able to push them to an “archive” collection that would be excluded from the queue but preserve information about the degree to which the sentences in it are known and when they were last played.

I was toying with the idea of clearing out my Favorites queue (moving the sentences that I get wrong to an “Ex-Favorites” collection for the time being) and then using it as a holding place for sentences that I get wrong but don’t want to review now. I can do this by marking such sentences both “Favorite” and “Ignore”. My thinking is that at some later point, I can move the sentences out of the Favorites into another collection. Given that my Favorites list only includes about 100 sentences that I can move into a separate collection in a single review session, this approach is clumsy but probably doable.

I’d be glad if anyone could give me any alternative suggestions or other feedback.

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#2

I’m sad to say I don’t have great solution to your problem, as during the last year I’ve worked up a review queue of some 5500 items, and that’s just for Spanish for English. (I don’t want to think about the other language pairings.) How did that happen? Well I just took a day’s rest and I could never clear the queue after that. Even for reviewing old stuff, the cognitive load of going through more than a hundred sentences a day takes its toll. I should also say that I’m reluctant to set anything, except the most basic words, to “fully mastered”, as I’ve noticed that I forget more than I would like.

I deal with that by manually setting the next-review date further away, depending on my own perception of the difficulty.

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#3

Since I posted here, I’ve also exchanged some e-mails with @mike and a support person. I would like to keep the discussion in one place, so I’m going to post here and send them another e-mail that points to this discussion.

@mike and the support person have been responsive and friendly. They have suggested that I make my own custom collection or try out the existing “Everyday Life” collection. Over the years, I have made several custom collections and contributed many sentences to them over the years, so the concept is familiar to me. (Note that Listening mode is not available for custom collections.) I have also checked out the “Everyday Life” collection. I’m not sure it’s what I’m looking for, but I’m willing to give it some more time. However, no matter how perfectly suited a collection is to my needs, I will be faced with an imperfect set of options:

(1) Play the sentences from that collection in addition to always clearing out my review queue from the other collections I’ve been playing.

(2) Abandon the goal of always clearing out my queue, and instead devote some or all of my time to playing new and review sentences from the new collection.

These come with both pros and cons. Approach (1) is simpler (practically and psychologically), but more time-consuming, to the extent that it might prevent me from doing the kind of activities I really need in order to reach my short-term goal. Approach (2) means I will have to stop being able to rely on Clozemaster to hand me a manageable chunk of sentences per day, and instead work out a way to figure this out myself. Note that if Clozemaster had a “Max total reviews per day” setting, I could still have it do the work of finding a manageable daily chunk for me. However, it only has a “Max reviews per collection per day” setting, and since my daily reviews are spread unevenly over about a dozen collections, it doesn’t help me.

I had originally asked @mike and the support person whether it was possible to have a separate account. They said it was, but it would have to be under a different e-mail address. That seems fair. However, they have not (yet) responded to my question asking whether it would be possible to tie both accounts to my Lifetime Pro subscription. In any case, however, @morbrorper’s response above made me realize that even if I shifted over, for the time being, to a separate account, I’d still have to deal with the practical and psychological consequences of the size of the review queue in my original account changing from helpful to unhelpful.

One change I’m trying out is to review all the sentences from my custom sentences first, which lets me listen to all the rest in Listening mode. This means having to do battle with the less-than-perfect text-to-speech quality for some of the sentences, but that’s probably good practice for dealing with the problems of imperfect sound transmission that I’ll face in the real world, even though the TTS distortions are different from the ones I’ll encounter when listening to people. It also means that I’ll be practicing the passive approach of recognizing words rather than having to come up with them from scratch, but I might just have to accept that.

I also set up an additional free account. It will only let me play a restricted number of sentences per day (30 in Text Input mode, 10 in Listening mode), but that should be enough to let me try out some experiments. I wouldn’t want to build up too many sentences in that account anyway.

As always, any feedback would be welcome.

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#4

I might try a two-pronged approach here: since you can identify helpful collections, and there’s a lot of them, start the day by going through any that have, say, >10 individually. Once you’ve done all those, set your max per collection to 10 (or whatever number) and then review all. At the end, set back to infinite for the next day.

Another thought: if you want to just remove the hard sentences from particular collections, go through 100-sentence reviews where you only see each one once and it’ll leave a bunch of things at 0%. Then you can go to that collection, select all the 0% sentences, and subtract from reviews. That will cause a hit to “sentences learned”, but you can also add those to favorites to remember which ones you’ve learned in theory and come back to later. You could also favorite or manually set to 25% anything you feel strongly about keeping.

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