When I first launched Clozemaster, the default option was vocabulary. You listen to the clip and just plug in the correct word. I felt like this wasn’t teaching me anything. I was not really listening to the entire sentence, instead I was just trying to listen for the word that sounded like one of the 4 options. Which wasn’t even difficult because most of the time the blanked out word and the other 3 options are totally different.
I was essentially just blitzing through sentences because it was incredibly easy. However I reset my account and switched to listening. Bros, the difference in my learning progress is literally 10 fold. Your brain is forced to listen to the full sentence, to try and dissect it, translate it and only then when you have heard it a few times, do you reveal the options.
After only 3 days I’ve reached a stage now where I can “chunk translate” and most importantly, identify where 1 word ends and another word begins. Whereas before it just sounded like 1 long blob of letters.
So yeah, my advice is 100% only do listening for the first 3 - 6 months.
I don’t recommend typing, simply because spelling accurately comes much much later in the learning experience I think. I mean what’s the point in learning to spell a word that you can’t even understand anyway.
Yeah man, that way of using the Clozes is probably the best way of learning. Its insane, how fast you can improve your understanding of the Language in that way. Though im still excited for new features regarding to the way of solving (or rather memorize) each sentence.
Welcome to Marx06 and Alxndr! Couldn’t agree more with the comments about Listening. I had been using mostly Typing-in to reach my goals but decided to slow down and improve my listening. What a difference!
I am very strict with my pass fail criteria. If I fully understand the sentence and can fill in the blank without ever seeing the sentence written and the 4 options, I mark it as mastered. If I get most of the sentence correct but stumble on 1 word or get the word wrong slightly, I will mark it as easy.
Everything else gets marked as hard, I get reminded in 5 days and I continue reviewing until I can mark it as mastered. Once I have built up a backlog of 50 reviews, I will keep playing those 50 reviews until I can mark all of them as mastered.
This prevents my review backlog from building up out of control.
Well you can do speaking at the same time as listening in clozemaster. So when you hear the sentence, shadow it several times. Play it 10 times over if need be to practice the pronunciation of the sentence. At least that way if you don’t understand what’s being said, you’re still getting some good speaking practice in.
Basically I recommend this exact setup.
Select listening with multiple choice.
Change the setting so the multiple choice options don’t appear from the start.
Play the sentence several times over, shadow it, try to understand it, try to listen for the individual words. Try to translate as much as you can. Spend at least 30 seconds on each sentence.
Reveal the options and confirm your guess / understanding.
Click the explain button and read through why the sentence is structured the way it is. Follow up by asking questions about anything you’re unsure about to your favourite large language model.
Give it a try, your goal is to listen, understand and remember, not blast through the content.
Do you think the fleuncy fast track has enough repetion of vocab to make the words and structures stick using this method? I remember trying something similar with the common words collections for Italian but it was too overwhelming (there is something like 50,000 sentences total lol)
I’ve not tried any other category so I’m not sure, but the key with language learning I think is not to over expose yourself. I see some people on here who have like 300 sentences in their review back log. With that many sentences you’re spreading your word frequency very thin. Which is essentially what you’re saying.
Like I said I like to keep a maximum of 50 sentences in my review list and I simply don’t do any new ones until I have ticked off a bunch on the review list. Think about what’s better, knowing 50 sentences perfectly, or knowing the odd few words out of context from 300 sentences?
This is also a problem with apps like anki, people end up adding cards faster than they can memorise the ones they already have. I saw one post of a guy who’d built up a review back log of 700 words… Which is essentially the entire A1.
Here’s what I’d suggest. Do 50 sentences per day, of which 49 will probably be added to your review queue because you won’t be able to translate them perfectly. Then each day login and do only the ones in your review list. When your review list gets down to 20, start another 20 new sentences.
I just discovered the “speaking” game and will definitely be doing a lot more of this. Up til now I’ve only been typing. The voice recognition isn’t 100% but it is good enough most of the time, and it is so useful to have to pronounce these sentences. Also the speaking game is fast! I can plow through a lot of cards.