After going through Duolingo Italian, I’ve been looking for good resources to build more vocabulary. My primary tool right now is reading through one of my favorite books translated into Italian with Learning With Texts, then pushing vocab words to Anki for practice.
I love the idea of ClozeMaster, but the repetition interval options are very minimalist - just four levels, with four intervals. I’ve become spoiled by Anki using a rough approximation of the SuperMemo 2 repition algorithm, which seems to work very well. On the other hand, with the default window of 10 days seems way too long for most words I don’t know - especially tricky words. But shortening them too far means I’ll either have larger gaps later, or ultimately be repeating every word every couple months.
I can probably lower the intervals, but it seems like the root cause is that the notion of “easyness” in Anki’s algorithm seems to make a huge difference for learning tricky words without making me waste time on words I know.
Is there any chance of getting more nuanced repetition scheduling in ClozeMaster?
Thanks for the feedback! This is really helpful to know. The repetition interval options are intentionally minimalist. The idea here is that the focus with Clozemaster should be on getting lots and lots of exposure rather than getting hung up on any single word or sentence, with more complex review options best left to resources like Anki which already implement it quite well like you mentioned.
That said! Adding more review interval options and improving the Clozemaster SRS is definitely on the to-do list, though it may still take some time until we get to it. One option for the moment might be to favorite any particularly difficult sentences that you’d like to focus on and then periodically export your favorites and import them into Anki.
If you have any other feedback or there’s anything else we can do to improve Clozemaster please always feel free to let us know. Thanks again!
Understanding the intent behind the current repetition interval options, I agree with edanaher that having the option to implement the SuperMemo 2 algorithm is genius.
Other than a possible coding headache for the developers, from a user standpoint I would REALLY enjoy it. Those of us who have experience with Anki would prefer the best of both worlds rather than jumping between apps. Why would CM not want to incorporate the best-practices of other apps? It would increase the number of CM users far above the others.
The SuperMemo 2 algorithm would also encourage users to learn more new sentences by smartly reducing the number of sentences needed for review.
For instance, there is only so much time in a day I can dedicate to ‘review’ and ‘new’ sessions. When I’m swamped with tons of words to review, that reduces the amount of time I can spend on ‘new’ words. It creates this weird accordion effect. There are days I want to study way more new words but stop myself because I know it’ll drive my review sessions in the future beyond what I can handle per day. The SuperMemo 2 algorithm helps decide where to invest my time based on my own abilities.
FYI, I eventually gave in and stopped caring about “a ton of words to review”. I’ve been skimping on clozemaster lately (prioritizing keeping Duolingo stable and reading/vocab building, with this only when I have extra time. That said, I’ve got over 4,000 sentences to review, and I just don’t care. Most of them I can get on the first try (especially with the prefix-checking - I love that feature, since it lets me figure out which synonym clozemaster wants), and the ones that I don’t (112, so far) I’ve favorited and imported into Anki.
It’s not ideal, but it seems like ignoring reviews on clozemaster and pressing onwards with new sentences is the only reasonable thing to do with the current review setings.
Maybe you can try the ignore function so you don’t ever have to review them? I’m not sure if that’s easy to do, I rarely do it. That way when you do eventually encounter words you need to study, you can review without digging through the massive library.
And yeah. A problem with Clozemaster is ironically the volume.
A completionist like me doesn’t want to skip ahead or miss something. But I don’t want to waste so much time on easy words I already know.
Solutions?
Reduce some volume (the developers are already aiming for this)
Maybe introduce a “test-out” concept like Duolingo has to bypass groups of words (hard to do with this style of learning since there is no grouping other than commonality)
Change the review algorithm
Create an option to set a limit to specific clozed words (user preference). That way you can basically suppress sentences for certain words you never really want to see.
You can hit the “ignore sentence” button whenever you complete a sentence you don’t want to see again, but I believe it takes two clicks to hit the button, then confirm whether you want to ignore just that sentence or all sentences with that word. I use the ignore function for very simple sentences I see no value in reviewing.
You can do it in bulk by hitting the Manage Fast Track toggle but there’s no way to exclusively target the words sitting in your review queue. Maybe this should be an option?
Good idea, we’ll work on getting that added until we’re able to make bigger changes to review intervals.
@edanaher@kadrian in addition to ignore there’s also the option to manually set a sentence to 100% Mastered, though that requires two clicks at the moment and could lead to a large review queue at some point as well. There are keyboard shortcuts for both ignore and set to mastered which may speed things up a bit. Ideally I’d like to make both ignore, set to mastered, and reset all one click (no confirmation) and add a way to go back to the previous sentence or see the sentences you played at the end of a round in case you clicked any unintentionally. All this in addition to trying to improve our review interval settings to help prevent large queues of reviews piling up.