Is Clozemaster boring?

Clozemaster Questions, Suggestions, Feedback
#47

Thanks @mike for the reply and the transparent communication :slight_smile:

I will answer within the next few days.

As you noticed, I personally have no need for gamification (and I like that I can disable all the planned new ideas), but I can see how some users would appreciate it, and I am not the navel of the world.

Going a bit offtopic here: What I personally would like to see improved: Whenever I open the leaderboard, it takes a couple of seconds to compile the leaderboard. I assume that an (expensive?) SQL query is performed in the background. If I re-open the leaderboard — maybe because I accidentally closed it too early — it takes around the same time to re-compute the leaderboard (from scratch?), even immediately after the first computation. It seems there is no caching in place. As a developer myself, I’m wondering how big of an opportunity to bring down costs, and to lower the barrier for new users to get a Pro account, is hidden in SQL query optimization. This is the kind of improvement I would like to see the most and appreciate (as a developer myself) rather than “daily doubles” and shiny new icons, even though I might be outvoted here by the average users.

Furthermore, if I want to see the leaderboard sorted by „mastered“ instead of „points“, or „all-time“ instead of „this week“, I always first have to wait those few seconds until „this week, sorted by points“ is compiled, with no possibility to cancel. I always feel bad for triggering unnecessary SQL queries when using the leaderboard.

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Leaderboard Slow to Load
#48

Agreed and already queued up! :+1:

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Leaderboard Slow to Load
#49

@mike A streakfreeze I can live with and the occasional clip - I’m happy with just the way you are.

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#50

I’m not much for the gamification features myself, but I like the idea of challenges to keep things a bit fresh. I DO think gamification will attract more users.

#51

Duolingo is great for playing games, so I’m told;-) tic

#52

Hello dear @mike
There’s one thing that can be a bit tricky in some languages (like German) → it’s accents…
On Lingvist, for example, there’s a tolerance: if you write “übernehmen” instead of “ubernehmen”, it’s still accepted.

I think it’s a good idea to have the option, so that the user can choose whether or not to have this tolerance.

Max

#53

@Mablaise: This is something I often hear people request, and it’s a popular idea. My personal opinion is that accents aren’t at all optional, and they change the word itself. In Italian (as in German), accents both change pronunciation and/or differentiate words. Truly it is a mis-spelling to leave an accent off.

For example in Italian e means “and” while è means “is”. One has an open “e” sound and the other a more closed “e.”

I think getting trained in correct spelling and pronunciation is critical. YMMV.

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#54

@Dcarl1 you’re totally right, that’s why I suggest to put it in “options”
personally, I would like this to go faster → I know how to write it, but I’d like to go faster

#55

I totally agree with @Dcarl1.

Also, please remember: This topic is about some users perceiving Clozemaster to be boring, due to its sheer amount of repetition, and how to (if at all) best address that. Please open a new topic for further discussion whether accents should be ignored. (I know I’m myself a bit guilty of having gone offtopic, but let’s not let it completely escalate.)

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#56

I agree. But is that necessarily something good?

In every business, you need to know your target audience. It’s better to have 1,000 users who are absolutely loyal than to try to cater to 10,000 users who don’t even know what they want and will leave you as soon as the next shiny hyped new thing emerges. And then leave a total mess behind, which the loyal core users would have to swallow.

If you don’t know your core audience, then you will build a product that nobody likes.

This might be an unpopular opinion: It would be a mistake to try to cater to those who are “not ready” for Clozemaster (at the expense of the “core users”). If these kinds of people want gamification, they can knock themselves out on Duolingo. But I’d hate if they forced Clozemaster to become a “Duolingo clone” simply because they are incapable of accepting Clozemaster as its own distinct, more mature thing.

If the targeted audience are the “shallow learners” who can’t be bothered to do some repetitions and care more about boasting with their achievements or rank rather than actually learning the language, there’s already Duolingo for them. It’s true that for learners who lack the intrinsic motivation, a few carefully chosen elements of gamification (such as the streak or leaderboard) are useful in committing to a serious and deliberate practice. (Not wanting to lose my streak for which I’ve worked so hard, is a good motivator for me.) But my question stands: Why build a carbon copy of something that already exists?

Many Clozemaster users are here, and not there, because they don’t need or don’t want that. They like that Clozemaster is different.

Although I’d have no problem at all if Clozemaster simply stayed as it currently is and considered itself feature complete, it’s true that Clozemaster could be further improved. I was pleasantly surprised by the ChatGPT feature, which is a great help. Imagine if Steve Jobs had said he likes the BlackBerry as it is. We would never have gotten the iPhone. Similarly, the radio or short story feature mentioned by @mike sound very intriguing.

In summary: I hope the targeted audience of Clozemaster stays the “loyal few” with an instrinsic motivation, who don’t need all that gamification nonsense that ruined Duolingo. Rather than catering to those who can’t be bothered and for whom investing 10 minutes a day is already too much if there aren’t dopamine-inducing “You did it! Great job! Buy this thing for $X to show your friends who’s the best.” messages every x sentences.

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#57

Well said I will also say that it feels like a person levels up too quickly on Clozemaster or least I do and then I feel guilty like I shouldn’t be a level 15 or 20 already I’ve only been using this just a little while. But it’s all good I like this platform I hope they take my meme seriously they could upgrade the gifts to include
dumb and dumber “we’re there”
Pippin toasting a beer and smoking a pipe “welcome to isengard”
Joker skipping down the stairs gif
Homer yoo-hoo gif
Jeremiah Johnson nod of approval gif
Black guys “ohhh” after I’ll rap battle
Gandalf lighten off fireworks and dancing at Bilbo’s birthday party
They could do Rob Schneider “you can do it”
Creeper from cholo fit dancing after he gets thrown out of the bar
The Australian guy saves his dog by punching out that kangaroo that’s what winning looks like that’s what leveling up feels like.

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#58

If you want to gamify your Clozemaster here’s a cool way to do that
I call it Clozemaster in concert what you do is go on YouTube and say you’re playing the Spanish deck on Clozemaster look up Spanish singers or Mexican singers like Gabriel Mesa or listen to the Psychedelic Cumbias of Peru and crank up the music while you play with the audio listening skills on and whenever you get a question right it gives you a bit of a rush cuz you have to listen hard to understand what they’re saying over the music.
Another cool thing you can do is challenge yourself to take the Clozemaster 10 languages 10 questions each challenge if you like you can post the results on YouTube you could tag Clozemaster on YouTube as they have their own channel.
I was surprised that I scored a 10 out of 10 in Russian Turkish and Indonesian even though I have only studied very little. I flunked the Mandarin and Thai but it was all for fun.
If you’ve not played the interlingua deck and have any knowledge of romance languages I encourage you to try it because it’s intuitive and natural feeling. A lot like Esperanto but even better.

#60

Gamification? It may attract more fun Gamers but it will lose more serious Learners. Just saying.

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#61

You review a sentence three times within the first two months: the day after you first saw it, 10 days later, and 30 days later. From then onwards, it’s only every 180 days.

Therefore, the number of times you have to review a word is

  • three multiplied by the number of sentences in which that word occurs,
  • or literally only three times if you play the Fluency Fast Track

if you only consider the first two months after first seeing a sentence.

In the “Fast Track”, if you see the sentence more often, you got it wrong and obviously needed the additional repetitions.

Since Clozemaster uses the database Tatoeba as its source, the real complaint of this user is that the Tatoeba database is too large, or at least that the training set that Clozemaster uses is too large.

The solution to that problem is already there, and it’s called “Fast Track”. As that particular user admitted himself/herself, after switching to the Fluency Fast Track (which contains every word only once) their “problem” of seeing that word to often solved itself.

To me, it’s a feature and not a problem that there is so much source material to study. In my opinion, testing a word only three times is not enough.

Idea: Maybe it would help if “Fast Track” were renamed to "For the impatient“.

Users are free to choose between “impatient mode” and “thorough mode”.

If a user doesn’t take up the offer of an “impatient mode” and then complains that he/she is bored “to death” by the wealth of source material, the problem is not with Clozemaster. If a user thinks he/she understood a word/sentence, the user can mark it as known. If a user thinks he/she understood, for example, the 500 most common words, nobody stops him/her from moving on to the 1000 most common words collection. Nobody is forcing him/her to take the 500 most common words collection to 100% completion if he/she doesn’t enjoy it. So much for that criticism.

I like it that there are so many sentences—because if I decide to learn a language, I want to do it thoroughly—and I don’t see the need to reduce their number if there already is “Fluency Fast Track” for the impatient.

Either way, the criticism is entirely unfounded. I think at the root of this entire topic is just the lazy approach of certain people wanting to see quick results but not wanting to do the required work. This doesn’t mean Clozemaster couldn’t improve its UX or progress visualization, but I don’t think Clozemaster needs to—or should—do anything to appeal particularly to such users, at least not if that means reducing the number of sentences within the collections or anything else that would also affect the more serious learners in any way.

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#62

@davidculley
I’m afraid you didn’t thoroughly read the original thread. After the OP switched from MCWCs to FFT, they no longer felt boring because FFT gives them one sentence per one cloze-word. MCWCs give you up to ten similar sentences per one cloze-word.

It’s like a set of muscle training with 1 pump-up for your right leg, right arm and left arm plus 10 pump-ups for your left arm. How many sets you will repeat in a certain period doesn’t matter. The imbalanced mix of frequency for different muscles is the problem. And that’s a design error of Clozemaster, not of a user. Everybody will simply get bored with the frequent repetition of pump-ups only for your left arm.

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#63

The way I see it, gamification, in the traditional sense of the word, is an attempt to reward the quantity of interaction. What I would like to see is an attempt to reward the quality.

For me, as a long-term user, there aren’t many rewards at all. I spend more time on Clozemaster than I would like to admit, but I only get a level-up notification about every month or so. I may see the number of sentences played go up slightly if I take note of it, and likewise the number of “sentences mastered”, but other than that, I have no idea of my progress. Am I improving or am I only churning? I wish the system could be more helpful in that respect.

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#64

I want to apologize if I come across as a bit extreme in this topic. It’s just that the Word of the Year 2023 is enshittification. I simply want to prevent my beloved Clozemaster from letting itself get steered into destruction by clueless casual users. Too many other services I loved went down that path. (Replace “clueless users” with “greedy shareholders” or “project managers who care more about their promotion than delivering a good product” in those other cases.)

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#65

I’m with you davidculley;-)

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#66

@Floria7
You probably don’t remember, but you once advocated gamification and even seemed to force your preference to a gamification hater here.

My point is that people use the term “gamification” in different ways, and some are overreacting to the term without analyzing the details. Why don’t you just respect others’ different learning styles, and just care about whether Clozemaster will give us an option to opt out from new gamification features?

@mike and all users,
As a new “challenge” system proposed by Mike, how about the number of new words you’ve learned?

I’ve already walked myself through all of the Most Common Words Collections. Since then, I’ve been adding new sentences to my personal collections while reviewing MCWCs. But I have to admit that recently I put less effort than I used to do so into MCWCs. That is probably because the bar charts of MCWCs are all green (100%). And as @morbrorper pointed out, the higher your point level goes up, the less frequently you move up to the next level.

If Clozemaster could count the number of new words - both in MCWCs or other ready-made collections AND personal collections, that might give (some of) us a real sense of achievement and encourage them to share new sentences/cloze words with other users.

The number of sentences you played/mastered as well as points earned don’t indicate your language proficiency. But the vocabulary size does - by borrowing the great phrase from morbrorper, the vocab size is a right metric for rewarding one’s quality.

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#67

Hi MsFixer. Ah, no way, 'fraid you have misunderstood me. I merely supported a couple of seconds of lighthearted congratulations upon leveling up. A totally different kettle of fish to all sorts of Duo-type gamification. You will perhaps note from my other posts that Billy Joel and I both emphasised “don’t go changing”:wink: And of course I respect the needs of others, particularly as suggested by morbrorper, how sad that you should accuse me of not doing so, I merely add my own thoughts like everybody else. Never mind, cordiali saluti, and have a good day.

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