I am commenting on Clozemaster in the year 2022 April 4.
(CM - abbreviation for Clozemaster)
For the record, I grew up speaking English and Chinese. Throughout my school life in Singapore, we learnt Chinese, and I grew up watching Chinese programs. We are regularly exposed to programs from China.
Recently, I purchased CM for my kids because I thought that the Cloze sentences would help them speed up their learning.
Pros
If you are new to the language, CM introduces the words in levels. You can choose eg:
100 most common words, 500 most common words, 1000 most common words.
In this way you can build up your vocab.
For those who do not like grammar, I find this method to be pretty useful in digesting sentences which are premade. You don’t have to think too much about it.
You can build up your ability to accept complex sentences. Sentences and words become more complex as you progress.
There are also users who key in their own vocab when they watch Chinese movies and shows. So serious learners also use this as a platform.
You can also include your own deck of sentences. When teaching my kids Chinese, I would key in a list of vocabs, and the system would churn up for me sentences. This saves me a lot of time! I use this method to prepare for my kids’ exams. So CM is an important tool at least for now. In Singapore, when we study Chinese, we literally need thousands of words at our figure tips. Not to forget, we would still need to learn how to write each character!
You can learn new words by either MCQ (multiple choice qns), fill in the blanks and you can choose to practice your listening skills.
The reading of the Chinese words - ie the pronunciation is reliable. It is accurate. As a Chinese language speaker, we are extremely demanding in this matter.
Cons
Some of the sentences sound awkward.
Out of 20 sentences, I would discover about 3 of them that sound awkward. Sometimes it feels like the sentences have been translated directly from an English example. In this case although the grammar is correct, as a Chinese speaking person - I would not talk in this manner or write in this manner.
For eg. in English we may say, Time and tide waits for no men.
At times, CM would attempt to translate this statement into Chinese. And it simply sounds out of place.
So I would usually have to look through the sentences quickly to make sure they are acceptable. I was concerned that my daughter (10 year old) would point out to me the awkwardness of certain sentences as well.
Nowadays, we learn the Simplified Chinese. However I notice that there were a few traditional Chinese words in the Simplified Chinese segment. Unless you are heavily exposed to the Chinese language, you would not recognize this flaw.
There is a tool in CM where you can key in a list of your own words and they would churn out sentences for you. As you know in the Chinese language, we learn a lot of Chinese proverbs that would be at least 4 words to even 16 words in length. The CM system or mechanism does not have the ability to church out sentences for words that are that long. They would only accept words that are at the most 3 words in length. At times the system would not churn up sentences for certain words which I keyed in. So that means I have to be alert and input them manually.
So would I still use Clozemaster? I would say use it as a tool to speed up your learning. This would definitely help.