I’ve noticed this problem in all of the languages that I’ve practiced, but it’s particularly noticeable in German.
There are a lot of sentences where the “word” being taught is presented as a name in the sentence. For example, recently I encountered sentences where the “word” was the name “Rex” and “Laurie”. Some more were “Ai” and “Lucky”.
What was even worse was, a while back, I encountered a sentence: “Mein Name is Hase.” where the word “Hase” which means “hare” or “bunny”, is used as a name, and the meaning of the word is not taught.
I have several issues with these:
- In the case where the word is an actual word, but is used as a name, the sentence is a waste because it doesn’t teach the word and it might wrongly lead a learner to think it is only a name and not a word.
- In the case where the word is not a word and is only a name or proper noun, it is often presented in an unnatural way. For example, I want to know why “Rex” and “Laurie” are appearing in lists of the most frequently used “words” in German. There might be some special use of these nouns which explains why they are showing up in frequent word lists, and if there is, it would make sense to pick a sentence to teach them that reflects this usage.
- If you’re going to include names, that would be great, but then why aren’t you including the most common and widespread names in the language? For example in German I’d like to see names like: “Julia”, “Sebastian”, “Melanie”, “Kristian/Christian”, “Stefan”, etc. The names being presented in Clozemaster exercises are nearly always more unusual or uncommon as actual German names than a long list of common names that are completely omitted. Prior exposure to names will help make it easier to remember names when you meet people with these names.
I would personally love to see all of these things addressed. Like, I’d love to see names in sentences, but I’d rather they prioritize German names in rough order of frequency of occurrence in the language. I also would like all words that are actual words to be taught as words, not as names. And if there is a name that is appearing in a word list for a reason, like a widely used proper noun, then I would want that meaning to be taught. A few sentences already do this and that’s great, but I think it would be prudent to examine all “name” sentences one-by-one, ideally to have a native speaker examine them.