I get an email each time a sentence I reported has been changed.
I only get one about half the time.
Ah thanks I guess none of mine have been fixed yet, I’ll keep checking!
Just as a flag, I have noticed a lot of the Welsh sentences are not correct grammatically. A bit hard to use since it is hard to flag a priori which ones (since I’m still learning!). Usually an issue of using the wrong form of a verb or something. Has a human really checked that? Any process to correct for errors?
The process is to click on the red “Report” button and report the problem.
The more individual sentences for which you do this, the better. As an alternative or in addition, you can collect specific examples in a file somewhere, then write a post about the set of them.
@howardmontagu and @CrimsonGrass2492
The progress of user error report handling varies by the language courses. Some of you may have to wait patiently.
For example, I have already filed hundreds of error reports for the Indonesian (ID) and the Japanese (JP) courses.
- ID: A new error report is always processed by the admin within a week.
- JP: As a native speaker, I submitted 300+ error reports two years ago, but less that five are updated so far.
It looks like the error handling process is on a first-come-first-served basis. The size of JP is 10+ times larger than ID. So, JP probably has a huge backlog.
Also notice that the error report handler does not apply the same change to all collections.
This means that if I push the report button during playing the Most Common Words Collection, the admin will update only the sentence in MCWC even if the same problematic sentence belongs to Random Collection and Legacy Fluency Fast Track as well.
I’ve been playing the new Ukrainian sentences since they were released a few days ago. I’m really happy to see that new content is finally available, and I’m glad that effort is being made to improve the quality of translations across the board.
Unfortunately, quality control for these new sentences appears to be entirely absent. After doing just 350 sentences I’ve already come across several egregious errors in the cloze words, as well as some others where the cloze words are not accurately translated, plus a couple of typos. Some of these mistakes would have been caught simply be using spellcheck – such as the one where the cloze was a Russian word rather than a Ukrainian word. (I’ve reported everything I’ve found so far.)
On a side note, the new change pushed the Random Collection all the way down to the bottom of the page, below even the Cloze-Listening. I think it deserves a more prominent position, given that it still accounts for the majority of the content that is available for this language.
Thanks for letting us know and thanks for reporting the sentences with issues, and sorry those issues are there! We’ll give it another pass, same for Welsh @howardmontagu.
I hate to beat a dead horse, but I imagine it must be challenging to run a business like this where you have no good way to audit what your own workers are doing, so I want to provide the clearest possible feedback: After having done more sentences and discussed them with my teacher, I do not believe that they were written by a native speaker, and I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that I should not continue doing new sentences because I’m either going to learn stuff wrong or I’m going to lose a lot of time compulsively vetting every single sentence which has something that’s new to me.
Brazilian Portuguese (and presumably Dutch) is/are now available I see, so I guess the progress bars need updating
P.S. I haven’t played any of the new Fast Track sentences myself, so I don’t know whether any of these courses have issues such as those raised by @keiths22,
@howardmontagu or @CrimsonGrass2492.
Thanks for the feedback @keiths22! Work in progress, and thanks again for all the reported sentences. Finding good translators/proofreaders is indeed a challenge! We’re in the process of another round of proofreading to be sure. Please note it sounds like for at least a few of the reported sentences, more colloquial translations were used which might be why your teacher doesn’t agree. As far as technical issues (Latin a instead of Cyrillic a for example), we’ll get those sorted in the meantime. I understand the frustration and sorry for the trouble! Hopefully you’ll give it another shot as we roll out any round 2 proofreading changes. We’ll try to update this thread as we do.
Brazilian Portuguese and Dutch are indeed now available, thanks for the bump @zzcguns
Each language has its own translators/proofreaders as you might expect, so quality may vary (sounds like we did just ok with our initial picks with Ukrainian for example), though the aim is that we’re at a much better starting point with this new fully vetted content vs content pulled in from Tatoeba and other sources.
Also! @keiths22 - where is your teacher from? I’m learning that Ukrainian can also vary drastically based on where you’re from in Ukraine.
Thank you for your reply.
I appreciate that translation can sometimes be as much of an art as a science, and one of the nice things about Clozemaster in general is that it has sentences written by a lot of different people who will each translate things as they see fit without any pressure to adhere to certain standards or guidelines. This allows you to see different ways that words can be used and different ways to say a single thing. This is a good way to learn a language.
However, the purpose of the Fluency Fast Track is to learn each word from only a single sentence. From my point of view, if I’m going to spend a lot of time repeatedly doing a single sentence in order to learn a word I’ve never seen before, then it’s important that this sentence be a good representation of how the word is most often used. I don’t know which sentences you say are colloquial translations, but as far as I’m concerned the sentences I reported either had unequivocal mistakes in them or were not very accurate translations – some to greater degrees than others.
My teacher is from Lviv. But I don’t think that should matter too much because I only asked her about the translations if I was still unsure after checking both the dictionary and sample sentences on globse.com
If I had confidence that the sentences were professionally translated then I’d probably be a little less trigger-happy on reporting. But I mean. There are literally Russian words in there. And a simple word like шиє was misspelled in a way that would make sense to a Russian speaker. Certainly Ukrainian is spoken differently amongst different communities and in different parts of the country – and one part of that is because Ukraine is a bilingual country and many people don’t speak Ukrainian correctly. I don’t want to learn Ukrainian the way it’s spoken by a Russian speaker – I want to learn each language separately and correctly.
The obvious mistakes themselves aren’t the problem. The problem is that when there are obvious mistakes, then there will also be subtle mistakes that I don’t notice. I reported a lot of obvious mistakes when I did the Random Collection, and I’m only just now learning that many of the other words and phrases I learned in there are actually incorrect as well (mostly all from a single Tatoeba contributor). I don’t have any regrets about that, because I learned a lot of stuff really fast, but I’m at a different point in my learning curve now and I have the luxury of being able to just choose not to spend time with material that doesn’t sit right with me.
It’s so sad… I’m really looking forward for the Arabic Course, the 6th most spoken, but no signal yet…
But is very good to see so many languages ready to launch or in progress!
Why can’t I manage sentences? If I’m looking for one I have to go in every thousand looking for it
@Roberto.Melgaco: I think you’re referring to the searchability of the “new” FFT. I have complained many times ever since it was introduced, but sadly it hasn’t been implemented yet.
I second @morbrorper 's opinion.
Unsearchable collections through the universal search bar are not only the new FFT but also personal collections. I’ve (indirectly) complained about this issue but no response from the admin yet.
I guess the overall data architecture was poorly designed and Clozemaster cannot quickly fix the issue, given the previous comment from Mike (the admin) on the data management. Once I proposed a tagging system and he said:
…how to actually migrate everything if we wanted to change the underlying architecture, etc. It would indeed be a long-term reform like you mentioned MsFixer, but there are some worthwhile potential benefits like you mentioned as well.
His comment implies that each collection is separately managed and there is no single repository. Therefore, massive data migration is required if you want to use the universal search for a sentence in the new FFT or your personal collection.
We’re aiming to start on Arabic next month, will update accordingly.
We have a backlog of French, Swedish, and Turkish ready to go at the moment. Italian has completed another round of proofreading, updates will be made soon. Ukrainian is going through another round of proofreading. Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Croatian are in progress.
@Roberto.Melgaco @morbrorper thanks for the nudge on this request! It keeps getting bumped by other projects/features/fires, but it’s on our list. I don’t have a specific timeline yet. All that said, it’d be helpful to understand - why are you using search? What are you trying to do?
I assure you the overall data architecture was expertly designed. Even “quick fixes” take time to do right, and other projects simply have higher priority at the moment.
I have many uses for search:
- I come across a word and I want to learn it, so I search for it in the corpus.
- Somebody comments on a sentence and I want to see the whole picture or hear the audio, maybe file an error report.
- Looking for synonyms: I often use “Translation” search to see what Spanish words are used for a word in English.
- Searching for patters: what preposition is used with this verb?
Of course, only having the “*” wilcard is a severe limitation. And, an option to limit the search to only return the sentences I’m playing would be very helpful, as it would save me the work of creating a new cloze when I already have it in a collection somewhere.