@mike, it’s amazing just how much the new Fast Track has improved my Clozemaster experience in German!
My situation is that I learned German pretty thoroughly several decades ago, and have retained most of what I knew then, but want to reacquaint myself as quickly as possible with the words I’ve forgotten. Previous to this, I had to choose between two options that didn’t work well for me: (1) the (legacy) Fast Track and (2) the X Most Common Words collections. The (legacy) Fast Track promised that I’d only have to see a word form once, but in order to get to the right level, I would have to plow through many rounds of the high-frequency words that I already know. By contrast, the X Most Common Words collections allowed me to jump in at whichever level of X I wanted, but there were a ton of duplicates within each collection. This meant that I’d have to repetitively choose “Known”, “Ignore” or “Ignore All” for words I knew fully. Even worse, any word that I wanted to review but only as a single instance, I had to go through a laborious process once I encountered a second instance:
search the collection for new instances of the word as clozes
mark them all “ignore”
By contrast, the fact that the new Fast Track lets you jump in at one of ten “levels” while still offering a unique set of word forms (if not a unique set of words in the dictionary entry sense) is literally a game-changer.
Thank you all for all the feedback and comments! I’ll try to answer everything above, apologies if I miss anything.
Work in progress to get the new Fast Tracks added for the inverse language pairings as well, ie learning English from Spanish, learning English from Japanese, etc. Likely within the next month or so.
This should now be fixed, please let us know if not.
This should be doable, but will take a bit of time. We can run all through the sentences through MeCab.
I’m updating the initial post with the progress bars, New Fast Track Tracker. Ideally we’ll be able to get it out for every language currently on Clozemaster and then some. As far as how long that takes and when we get to each, that’s TBD and depends on budget. The more people that get Clozemaster Pro the more we’ll be able to do!
First, the Clozemaster Japanese course gives you sentences with {{cloze-word}}s like these:
{{beautiful smile}} ({{素敵な笑顔}})
{{beaut}}iful smile ({{素敵}}な笑顔)
{{beautiful}} smile ({{素敵な}}笑顔)
beautiful {{smile}} (素敵な{{笑顔}})
{{person whose smile is beautiful}} ({{笑顔が素敵な}})
That’s the meaning of “improper lemmatization”. There is no ground rule how to carve out a {{cloze-word}} from a sentence. Therefore, the current Clozemaster system counts the number of learned words as five. But the most rational number is two: 素敵な and 笑顔.
Second, counting the number of unique Kanji (Chinese characters imported to Japanese) - instead of “cloze words” - doesn’t indicate your vocab size. Some Japanese words consist of more than one Kanji. Some Japanese words do not contain Kanji at all. One Kanji can be used in more than one different words.
Suppose that you know Kanji 素 (meaning: base; source) and 敵 (meaning: enemy) independently. However, it doesn’t guarantee that you also understand 素敵な (wonderful; fantastic), 素直な (honest; obedient; naïve), 素性 (identity; real background), 素質 (competency; talent) and 匹敵 (comparable; equal).
FYI: This improper lemmatization causes some other issues like this (re: Embedding Wiktionary pop-up). I’m not the only one who complained about the issue.
@MsFixer: I understand nothing but it sounds as though you know what you’re talking about. You have my support as I plan to soon start the Japanese track myself.
While I was glad to see the banner for the new Fluency Fast Track (“New! We’ve released a new version of the Fast Track…”) once, I don’t need to see it anymore, and it’s taking up valuable screen real estate. Could you please give it an X in the upper right-hand corner so that we can dismiss it once we no longer want to see it?
I have been playing through the new Japanese fast track and submitting errors, is anyone able to point me in the direction of a change log or something similar to see if these errors get fixed?
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 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.
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.
I’ll try to answer everything above, apologies if I miss anything.
but it sounds as though you know what you’re talking about. 
