By the way @mike, is there any possibility that the Manage Sentences button (the hamburger icon) for the individual collections could be returned to being a first-class button/icon for each collection, rather than being buried under the “…” icon ?
As Manage Sentences is the search facility for each collection, I use that facility all the time, and judging by posts in this forum, so do many other people (e.g. I was delighted to see that you recently added the ability to search by “Marked as Known”, which is one such example of you responding to people using that facility).
I was hoping we would get a review collection button added to the top of each collection, but now I can’t even see all the collections and my progress in them. If there was too much clutter before I think making each collection collapsible with would have fixed that.
IMO the stretched out mobile-type look is also awkward and makes poor use of space. I think it would be a bit better if instead of having “Play” across the whole screen, it had “play” and “review” options for each set. I’ve always found it odd and annoying that I can’t just review the section I’m looking at, I have to instead click review from the top of the page and choose the section I want.
That’s an interesting solution, except that I was reviewing these sentences not from the “review all” option but actually selecting the collection to review them from the “Ready to review” box. I suppose I might not be the norm, but I wanted to only pin the collections from which I was learning new words. And anything that I have completely “played” and only has review to do, I only want to access them from the “Ready to review” box and not from the general dashboard.
In short, I was imagining a more static dashboard that’s driven solely by my decision to pin or unpin to the dashboard.
One suggestion for those collections that automatically get pinned to the dashboard that have no new sentences to play - to turn the “play” button into “review” button. Currently it shows a grayed out play button, so it’s really not help to have them pinned to the dashboard. If I can at least directly review those collection with one button from dashboard, then I can see some value in having them pinned.
Here are some examples of the type of changes we love to see from Clozemaster —
More sentences! Such as the brilliant fast track series you have been rolling out recently, so good! Welsh even!
More languages! There are at least three or four major African languages just sitting there for the picking over on Tatoeba!
Groovy new functions! Such as my objectively awesome suggestion of randomised clozes, which I’ve been suggesting for three or four years now!
Here’s an example of the type of changes we DON’T love —
Having to spend 20 minutes looking for a crucial button that used to be in a prominent and intuitive position!
Clozemaster, you already have all the style that anybody could ask for. All that remains for you to do is to continue filling out your substance, which is already utterly unique!
All of which is to say – very dismayed and bored by the recent changes. Sorry, but it’s the truth.
I’m sorry to have to agree with the negative sentiment here, but there were already
many glitches and shortcomings that could have been addressed before taking on a big UI overhaul. Just to mention a few:
Integrate the “new” Fast Track with global search.
Improvements for keyboard users: there are many inconsistencies in how the Enter and Esc keys are handled in different dialogs.
Display the Easy, Normal and Hard buttons as soon as one reaches 100%, not only on recurring review.
Use a press of a percentage icon to immediately set the current level of mastery without having to “edit” the sentence.
Add the option to hide the entire sentence in the target language, to let the user attempt to translate the full sentence before focusing on the cloze at hand.
The download button was the only reason for me to pay for this service. I like the content and want to support it, but I need to be able to export to Anki for my learning needs. I’m very sad that this has disappeared and I won’t be extending my subscription unless it returns.
I prefer the old style format .
Someone wrote: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Why do we have to constantly mess with things that work just fine?
That is exactly what I think about this now.
Why not leave us the choice with a button : OLD STYLE FORMAT ?
If you download all the content, you won’t need the subscription anyway, right? I found the lifetime subscription to be reasonably priced and supports the project development and developers.
It would be nice to have an offline mode. There are times that I don’t have internet.
Anki has a better algorithm (FSRS), but I like to pay for the content and the updates/corrections. My first year is almost finished and I was planning to either extend for a year or go for the lifetime subscription after the year ends.
Thank you for explaining. Anki lets you make decks and make available to others, so probably the developers need to control access to their content. I appreciate your dilemma of liking the tool. I didn’t love Anki myself, clozemaster has been one of my favorite tools for learning a language.
The people that like to steal the collections and share them elsewhere can still get them by scraping, whereas honest customers like me want something that’s supported and where they can rely on. Not only do I like Anki’s algorithm better, but I also don’t like the idea of my progress data being owned by an external party that can cease to exist at any time, especially since I’m planning to use the Clozemaster collections for many years (with a subscription if it allows me to keep them up to date).
And think about this: you can get large Anki vocabulary decks based on word frequency lists for free, including ones with sample sentences. What’s unique about Clozemaster is that they get updated with the help of a community. The learning tools and the cloze sentences are not unique selling point.
apologies, I don’t mean to accuse. You have made it clear that you wouldn’t do it. Too bad that there are people that would. So content creators need to protect their content as best they can.
As someone who tends to mutter “If it ain’t broke etc”, I’m surprised to find I really like it. (Have also just discovered the Review button in Collections:-)
Such a great overview! Can we please have it for the FFT too for the different levels? For some reason, I find it very satisfying and motivating. (Btw, I was hoping to see something like this on the dashboard for the active collections, but it is hampered by the big play buttons, so this is a good alternative. Thank you!)
