Now that I’ve spent 3 months with Clozemaster Pro, during which I’ve used the program every day, I want to share my impressions with you. Some of the points I bring up are mentioned in other threads, but some are not.
Biggest plusses:
- Cloze exercises are a good way to train my responses (either “think of the translation” or “think of the right form of the word”), so using a tool based on them feels productive.
- I like having a text input option, which I use exclusively. The fact that Duolingo forced me to use multiple-choice made it too easy.
Biggest negatives:
-
The fact that the right answer is often flashed at me before I have a chance to guess it both irritates me and forces me to work around it (train myself to look away from the screen or block the input field for a second with my finger until the flash goes away). I’ve reported on this in a separate thread: Suppress the initial flash of the cloze word - #4 by alanf - Questions, Suggestions, Feedback - Clozemaster
-
The source of the sentences is the Tatoeba corpus, with all its quirks and deficiencies (and I know them well, being an administrator of the site). In particular, the most prolific contributor to the site insists on using, for the most part, only two names, both of them very Anglophone (“Tom” and “Mary”), one city (“Boston”), one month (“October”), and one time (“two thirty”). The same imbalance and lack of diversity appear in the sentences imported by Clozemaster. This is a disaster for language learners, who never get a chance to learn and practice other names, cities, months, and times. It’s particularly bad for those learning a language like Russian, since the name “Mary” cannot be declined like a real Russian name. It could be mitigated with some work on the Clozemaster side (for instance, by performing searches that exclude these words and phrases, or that look for names like “Sergei” and “Olga”, and importing the results). I’m also working on writing sentences at Tatoeba with a variety of names and encouraging others to do the same. Once I’ve collected them, I can tell you how to import them.
-
Since more than one word will often fit in the cloze, and there’s no clue given as to which one is wanted (for instance, “formal” or “informal” to indicate whether a verb form corresponding to the formal or informal second person is wanted when the sentence does not include a pronoun that makes this clear), I need to rely on (a) the function that show me whether I’ve typed the right characters so far and (b) the functionality that restricts the text box to the width of the right answer. This means that I train myself to cheat by guessing the first letter, then the letter after that, and so on. There is some value to the exercise, since I can apply the lessons learned (for instance, which prefixes are most common) when I guess the word in real life. But it’s still not ideal.
-
Sentences are not really ranked in order of difficulty, so there’s no progression. In the fluency section, they’re ranked by frequency of cloze word, which is at least a start. However, “rare” words are often not very good ones (for instance, the Russian transliteration of the English name “Bill”). Outside the fluency section, there is no ranking by difficulty at all.
-
Multiple sentences often have the same cloze word in the same context, so there’s a lot of duplication. For instance, there are many sentences where “Boston” is the cloze word and is preceded by “in”.
-
Marking a sentence whose cloze word I already know as “ignore” requires two clicks (and currently cannot be done via a keyboard shortcut). See some of the posts on the thread More repetition scheduling options? - Questions, Suggestions, Feedback - Clozemaster It also cheats me of the points I would receive by guessing it correctly. Since I get 8 + 16 + 24 + 32 = 80 points (assuming I’m using text input) for guessing a word correctly at the 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% mastery levels, this is a real disincentive if I’m going to pace myself by the number of points I collect.
-
Outside the fluency area, indicating that I want to review a sentence even though I’ve gotten it right seems to have little effect. I’m forced to mark it a favorite and to rely on withdrawing it manually from the favorites list when I feel I’ve really learned it.
-
The algorithm used to determine the spaced repetition, unlike the algorithm used by Anki, does not allow any input to indicate how easy I find the sentence. This means that I am forced to repeat easy sentences as many times as difficult ones (unless I mark them “ignore”, which, as I’ve explained above, is both time-consuming and destructive to the score incentive). See More repetition scheduling options? - Questions, Suggestions, Feedback - Clozemaster
-
On an Android tablet, I can’t use a keyboard shortcut to press the “Next” button. This forces me to go back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse or mousepad.
Many of these problems magnify each other. For instance, the fact that sentences are not ranked by difficulty is aggravated by the fact that marking a sentence “ignore” is so cumbersome, with the net result being that after three active months on the site, I can’t choose to see sentences that are fundamentally different from the ones that I saw originally.
I welcome any discussion. I hope you will find this useful.
“Boston” is indeed often preceded by the word “in”. That said I am planning on capping the number of sentences for a given cloze word in the Most Common Words collections.