I find I’m using the little brain symbol far more often now, to ensure that sentences I’m comfortable with don’t get added to my review collection.
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I am using Duolingo and I really enjoy Clozemaster. I love the sentences patricularly the listening, input and transcribe options.
Through the Duolingo forum, (which Duolingo closed down, so everyone made an alternative forum), I found out about free online Irish classes, and via the Duolingo forum I also found a study buddy that I meet with for an hour a day 5-6 days per week. It was someone from one of those Irish classes that I was in that showed me Clozemaster because they had lost patience with Duolingo.
I find both really useful. Horses for courses. Duolingo has challenges with sentence structures and prounication. Irish (as Gaeilge) has a totally different set of phonetics to English. But it’s good for vocab building and practicing and without it I wouldn’t have found the Free Irish Classes, my study buddy or Clozemasters.
I have found solid resources on both the Clozemasters and (unofficial) Duolingo Forums. The sense of community is nice to be a part of, in Clozemasters I like the listening, input and transcribe options. There’s not a huge amount of sentences for Irish, so I have been looking for resources and I have been making my own private collections.
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@rinkuhero @giuseppeBG
Honestly, I’m not a big fan of thematic collections/units such as “animals” and “professions” for three reasons based on my experience with Duolingo.
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Such thematic collections often give us more nouns and fewer general verbs and adjectives. The further your proficiency level goes up, the more you need to acquire abstract and conceptual words that cannot be categorized by themes. So, thematic collections work only for beginners (i.e. the core users of Duolingo). But probably not for Clozemaster users. Instead, some popular language courses offer Cloze-Reading materials sourced from Wikipedia articles. Expanding Cloze-Reading would be more realistic.
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Thematic collections may motivate you when you play new sentences. When you review sentences, however, you may be lost in many thematic collections and cannot decide which one you should review next. That was one of the frequent complaints raised by Duolingo users during the old tree era.
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Thematic collections require heavy customization for each language and additional human resources (and budget). I love the current Clozemaster’s lean product development/operation system by minimizing customization for an affordable pricing. Thematic collections can be probably achievable if Clozemaster adopts volunteer-based incubator programs, thought.
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One more “I get bored” comment was posted on Reddit recently:
It seems like words and phrases are repeated so often.
I also tend to get bored to death from reviewing the same sentences over and over.
The OP played a few Most Common Words Collections (MCWCs) and got bored. After switching to Fast Fluency Track, the OP seemed to be fine. I think the policy of up to 10 sentences per 1 cloze-word makes the easier MCWCs very redundant.
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I didn’t get bored going through the Most Common Words Collections, but rather a bit frustrated since I couldn’t see myself progressing fast enough. Switching to the Fast Fluency Track doesn’t make me feel at ease either because of the sheer amount of new words presented. Not trying to criticise the design of these collections, I’m merely still trying to find out a better study approach.
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I do need all these repetitions!
Yes, I am a slow learner but I am surely not the only one.
Furthermore, if you encounter a new word in only example sentence the danger will be that you get a misleading narrow impression of the meaning and the usage of this word.
Maybe all this “boring” discussion is born out of misconception, which I encounter so often with my university students and which is unfortunately propagated by modern didacticians and advertising (Babbel, anyone?) alike, the chimera of effortless learning.
You simply cannot learn anything worthwhile without putting a lot of effort in it. Face it.
And now I am going to do my daily 100 sentences, whether I am bored or not.
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@anon94972132 Just loved your reply! Can’t add anything more, can’t add anything more, can’t… 
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I’m not sure what your target language is about apoTotoa but if I could recommend doing things to improve your studies I’d suggest babadum to keep it fun
Find channels on YouTube to subscribe to better teachers in your target language.
If you’ve not done a word search yet can be fun they sell bilingual ones on Amazon.
if you’re looking to Branch out into other languages consider taking the
Clozemaster 10 languages 10 questions each challenge
when I took the 10 languages challenge I was completely stunned at how many I did really well in even though I didn’t know languages like Turkish Russian or Indonesian.
Lingo Pie is like the Netflix of language learning if you’ve not checked it out get on over there.
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it’s true that there is a noun bias, but, most words in any language are nouns (sometimes 90%), and usually, when you are consuming native materials (i’m learning spanish and i often play videogames in spanish, especially text-heavy games like rpgs), when there’s a word i don’t recognize, almost all of the time, it’s a noun. i already know basically all the common verbs, it’s the nouns i need more practice in. and there already are many sections for verbs (e.g. ser vs estar, verb conjugations by tense practice) on here on clozemaster, so it already has a lot of material on verbs as it is. we also retain noun vocabulary better when it’s grouped, like learning all the musical instruments in a band all at once is easier to remember than if you one by one, learned the word for flute one day, then trumpet 20 days later, then trombone another month later, etc., there’s a reason traditional textbooks and classes often have themed chapters that teach vocabulary of a certain area of life all at once.
and it also allows people to focus on their specializations and interests more, like if someone is interested in music and is a musician, learning a bunch of music-related terms all at once would keep their interest more than just learning more words in general in order of frequency.
also, regarding grammar, often verbs, nouns, and adjectives are related, and if you know the base noun, you can guess the adjective or verb that has the same root word. for instance, in english, if you know what ‘burn’ is (the noun, like having a burn on your hand), you can sort of guess what ‘burn’ (the verb) is, or ‘burnable / burnt’ (the adjectives) are. if you see the word ‘burned’, ‘burns’, or ‘burning’ after you know the noun ‘burn’, you can guess what they mean, even though they aren’t nouns. so it’s not like learning more nouns doesn’t also (indirectly) teach you verbs/adjectives/etc. – in the development of languages, usually the noun is the oldest form of a word, and the verbs and adjectives are derived from the noun. so it makes sense to learn the noun first.
lastly, clozemaster is already set up for it. it has cloze collections, where users can make their own groupings by category. all i’m saying is that there should be some more ‘official’ cloze collections, instead of relying on users to create those groupings, there could be moderators chosen who can make or highlight / select some “official” or suggested ones, instead of having to dig through 70 pages of user-created ones, most of which are low quality, only have a couple of sentences, and largely useless.
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One thing I might add is that compared to Duolingo the sentences here are more colloquial and conversational, which develops patterns in your brain that helps foster actual communication. I see the work here as supplemental in a way to active/passive listening training.
One of my (many) pet peeves about Duolingo Italian was that it completely ignored the grammatical structure of appending pronouns to verbs or pronouns to pronouns, which CM does not. You can’t go five minutes in Italy without using this structure.
EDITED TO ADD: Just tried the new “tiered” fast track, and it is truly boring for an intermediate student. Personal pronoun after personal pronoun. Article after article. I prefer the Legacy Fast Track, so will stick with that.
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I used Duo Italian to the end, and in my opinion, Cloze is far better. Basta.
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Esattamente! 
What a lovely video that was and a great way to listen to Italian!
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Go raibh maith agat a Scott! (Thank you!)
I hadn’t throught of word search! That is a great idea!
I am learning Irish know as “Gaeilge”. So the resources can be thin on the ground at times. But I have found so many now I am a little bit overwhelmed.
I am curious Scott.
I tried to join Babadum.com | Free Language a few times and the website says “Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.” It doesn’t have Irish listed but I did put “other” in. I will keep trying.
When you say flash cards Scott, do you mean physical or through an applicaton?
Is this what you mean? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Usborne-Everyday-Words-Irish-Flashcards/dp/0746067933/ref=sr_1_15?keywords=irish+flashcards&qid=1703024775&sr=8-15 ?
What flash card applications are folks using? Any suggestions?
Sadly Lino Pie doesn’t have Irish yet. But it is good to note. We do have Irish language television TG4 and Irish language children’s programmes Cúla4 both of which are excellent and I am trying to listen to as many children’s programmes as possible.
Irish is Verb-Subject-Object, so it is different from some other languages and we have the Copula as well.
I am interested in all the suggestions! Go raibh maith agaibh!
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@Spock, the site you found is trying to grab people who are trying to find the real Ba Ba Dum. Type babadum.com (or https://babadum.com/) directly into your browser.
Ever since @scott86 mentioned Ba Ba Dum, I’ve been using it to find words I don’t know. After that, I search for sentences that use them (one can do this via either Tatoeba or Reverso Context), and then feed the sentences into my custom collections here on Clozemaster. Thanks for the tip, Scott!
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Ba Ba Dum is seriously addictive! I guess that’s a thank you.
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Thanks for sharing these facts.
Personally, I really like Clozemaster as it is currently 
it’s just perfect, works well, really fast and no graphical distractions
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I don’t mean to be rude or to disrespect, and I don’t mean you personally (please don’t be offended), I’m just talking generally here:
I think this (the perception of not progressing “fast enough”, whatever that means) is not a weakness of (or something wrong with) Clozemaster, but simply the expression of people’s desire for instant gratification.
Learning anything worthwhile takes effort. Learning requires repetition. Therefore, some days are very boring, some days are just a little boring. You have to just grind through it. The sooner people accept that, the better for them. The skills you acquire in the process will reward you for sticking through it, but it takes patience. (Training your “patience muscle” as an often overlooked side effect of learning a foreign language will benefit you in other areas of life as well, so why not view it as something positive? 
)
The internet is filled with “How I became fluent in 3 months” videos, “become fluent in 30 days” courses, etc. which is just not how learning works. Constantly comparing realistic progress with these unrealistic false promises or other students is what trains people to feel this sense of not “progressing fast enough”. If people were progressing twice as fast, many would instead complain “Why am I not progressing 5x as fast?” “Why not 10x?” This is why I said, the sooner you accept the grind, the better.
I used Duolingo many years ago, when it was still kind of okay. The extreme gamification has completely ruined that website. Please don’t go down that path with Clozemaster.
I think the underlying issue is not with Clozemaster but with the conflict between how human memory works and human psychology (wanting everything as fast as possible).
People who have understood instant gratification have no problem with Clozemaster (at least I and the like-minded commenters I have seen on this forum don’t have). @mike, if you’re reading this: Please don’t change Clozemaster for the worse, in an effort to cater to people “feeling they’re not progressing fast enough”. Not only will that irritate the “silent majority” of Clozemaster users who are perfectly happy with it, Clozemaster would suffer the same fate as Duolingo. Which neither you nor we want.
Thanks everyone for reading my post, it became longer than intended. Again, I’m not meaning to be rude to anyone, just genuinely trying to be helpful by trying to help whoever is reading this change their mindset instead of wishing the app were different.
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I made my post quite some time ago and forgot what it was exactly. Reading your reply made me wonder what kind of unrealistic change I wanted clozemaster to make. It turns out to be none. I did not even slightly mentioned they should do any change to their design or whatever, nor saying they have a “weakness” or “problem”. I enjoyed it and am still loving it. In my post I was merely stating that I was trying figure out MY study approach and shared how I felt being a new user. I think my reply is not inappropriate in a post like this. And once again, I did not ask clozamaster to change anything for me.