This is great.
I have two questions.
- Are there any plans to add Latin?
- Will we get more sentences? Even 5k more words would make a huge difference.
Again, thanks a lot for this new direction clozemaster is taking.
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I appreciate your active engagement in the forums, Mike! The transparency is especially wonderful. I would love to know if you can tell us anything on the specific timeline of the French fast track rollout. I have plans to learn German through French in a few months, and what I’ve heard from the new fast track this seems like an excellent medium for it. Thanks again!
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Hi Mike, any updates for Cantonese? I’ve noticed progress seems to have stalled.
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Update, it happened within the last 9 minutes 
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I gave a glowing evaluation of the new Fast Track earlier in the thread (on April 15):
At that point, I was thrilled that the new Fast Track was designed to let you (1) jump in at one of ten levels of increasing difficulty and (2) only have to encounter a word form once (per track, I think). I hadn’t played long enough to determine whether the collections actually lived up to the promise: was each level really more difficult (composed of significantly less common words) than the previous one, and was each word form actually presented only once?
As time went on, I became conscious of some repetition. However, I haven’t been able to keep track of whether I’m encountering multiple forms of the same word or the same word form, nor whether I see the repetition within a single track or over multiple tracks. Trying to remember this would be an unacceptable cognitive load on top of the main activity of filling in the clozes. Normally, if I encountered a suspiciously familiar cloze word, I would rely on search to determine whether I had actually seen it (or another form of the same word) before. But the fact that search doesn’t work yet in the new FFT means that I can’t do that evaluation.
So one of my answers to “Why do you use search?” is “To determine whether or not I’m crazy when I think I’ve already encountered the same word.” Another is “Even if the word form has appeared only once, how many marginally different forms of the same word does the collection contain?”
To be clear: this is especially important for a language that I find easier, since I want an efficient way to go through relatively large numbers of words that I know in order to find the occasional ones that I don’t remember. For languages that I find more difficult, repetition is not as annoying.
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Sir, yes, Sir!
Well, I actually use the “Round history” option around 10% of the time - and that means at least 10x a day.
I use it because after listen and type correctly a sentence, I feel that I didn’t fully grasp the concept or the feeling in that sentence, so I go after it to reset it. About 90% of the time this is the case.
The duplicates are interesting. I didn’t have to search much to find quite a few. I suspect for certain languages there are quite a lot, although mike would be best equipped to confirm this.
In your thread (Fluency Fast Track in German has the same cloze twice in the same round), I posted regarding duplicates in the Mandarin Chinese fast track. You can see that the duplicates appear to be different forms of the word in English which happen to be the same in Mandarin. For example “married” and “marry” both end up the same (结婚) in Mandarin. Same with “and” and “with” both being ”和”, “them” and “they” both being “他们”, and “I” and “my” both being ”我”.
I understand it isn’t straightforward how to address this, and in fact it may be good to have these duplicates to show how they are used differently. However, I do believe it is misleading and/or confusing to state that each level includes 10,000 unique words.
I would appreciate seeing the true number of unique words for the sake of transparency so I know how many I have actually learned.
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Well put, I’ve requested the same numbers for the same reasons for Japanese. Apparently it is a thing that could happen, maybe we will find out soon. There’s utility to these stats but it’s also just a lot of fun to keep track of them (how many characters/how many words etc)
New languages have been added !!!
There are now 18 languages with the new Fluency Fast Track judging by the “Sentences List” list at the bottom right of the Clozemaster dashboard screen.
Newest additions are -
- French (has been available for a few weeks)
- Ukrainian (2nd time lucky
) - Persian / Farsi
- Turkish
- Swedish
- Lithuanian
@mike still needs add these to the first entry of this thread (as at 2am AWST 29th June 2024), but they appear to be available now.
(N.B. I haven’t verified this by starting to study all of these languages, as it would trigger notifications that I would then have to delete).
Now that my “waiting for the new course” excuse has gone, it looks like it’s finally time for me to start using Clozemaster for Turkish …
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russian update finally, thanks!!!
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Duplicated cloze word in new FFT (Russian). Some have already mentioned this but I feel like I have to post because this is ridiculous. The description of Fast Track Level 1 is “Most common words 1-1,000 are used as the missing word.”, with the 1000 most common words occurring over 1,000 sentences. But just as an example есть is used as the cloze word 4 times in Fast Track Level 1. Unless I’m missing something this is a blatant misrepresentation of what’s in FFT. Why go through all the work of making FFT better and having some big release but not even do a simple check of making sure you don’t have duplicated cloze words when you imply you don’t. I love Clozemaster but I find this so aggravating.
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Thanks for posting about the dupes in Russian and sorry for the aggravation. We’ll work on getting those cleaned up where possible. There will still be some duplicated cloze words. Good point about “Most common words 1-1,000 are used as the missing word.” being unclear. We’ll update it to something like “Missing words are in the range of 1-1,000 of the most common words, though there may be some not used as the missing word or some missing words used more than once.”.
The process we went with is to essentially translate the same set of 10,000 English sentences into as many languages as possible. The issue, however, is that although the English set has 10,000 unique cloze words, they don’t always translate into 10,000 unique cloze words. Having super high quality content seemed worth the trade-off.
A potentially better alternative approach we might try in the future could be to attempt to select 10,000 words in Russian, for example, that seem worth learning from a frequency list, then create an example sentence for each of those words and have them translated into English. The thought, however, was that this approach would require much judgement from the person creating/selecting/proofreading the word list as well as the sentences, and it would be therefore much more difficult to scale vs a straight translation project - translate/proofread this set of sentences from English into Russian and keep the word in {{}} the same to the extent possible.
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Thank you for the response mike. I appreciate the explanation of the process and why it was chosen. Makes sense.
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Mr. @mike is amazing, isn’t he?
But I’m still looking forward in order to do English from Portuguese… 
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Would love if we could get Swahili at some point! So hard to find good input material.
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Hi. I started Swahili with Memrise during covid, such a beautiful language. Can’t seem to get into the Memrise course now, it has all changed, so Swahili here would be more than interesting.
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Hi! Any plans for Icelandic to get updated? I know it´s probably way down the list. Thanks for all your hard work!
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I briefly checked out the new fast track on swedish and i love how its set up. Will all languages eventually have it? My priority language right now is hebrew and i dont see it mentioned here. I’m also learning greek but i DO see that one mentioned plus i dont think I’m quite ready for clozemaster yet when it comes to greek anyway.
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I see that I can now learn English from Portuguese. This is AMAZERFUL! 
I also see no one has mentioned that yet - Maybe Portuguese was privileged?
Pity I can’t do Listening > Transcribe (Hard) on it. 
Could it be that it will be implemented soon? 
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