Do you use spelling hint? Do you find it helps or hinders your learning?
I have been doing spelling hint exclusively except for the very beginning of my journey, and I have also been using the spelling hint (both the color and off by one or two letters feature). I do it to progress quickly since my objective is to be able to recall the words to speak more fluently. In that sense, these two features are helpful.
Where I run into a problem is that sometimes I lean on the color hint to aid memory. For example, if I get the first letter, then for the most part, I can recall the word. I know this is not something I should be doing. But when I see that I have 75% mastered the word, and especially when the translation is a little off or contextual, my resistance to the idea of completely resetting the word to 0% mastered grows and I am tempted to “figure it out” using the color validation feature because chances are I do know the word and most likely could have used it in real life without a problem.
I already have a lot to review and I don’t want to blow it up by adding words that I do know and do not need to review again. After all, the purpose of clozemaster isn’t to remember word for word exact translation of each sentence. It is to master the cloze words.
Anyone else thinking about this? What is your strategy?
I use both features, that is to say the colour hint and the one or two letter feature.
I often go through a large number of sentences typing the answers quickly, and without these aids I would be resetting sentences all the time. I also sometimes don’t notice that I haven’t used the correct letter, for example in Turkish I might try to enter the letter “ı” (without a dot) but instead have the letter “i” (with a dot), and at times I find it difficult to spot this error when I am going through sentences quickly. The colour hint makes this easy to identify.
I also set Enter Submits Empty to “Off”, as I never want to submit an empty answer but I did sometimes accidentally hit enter, for example when wanting to use the shift key to get a capital letter at the beginning of a word and accidentally having my little finger press the enter key instead of the shift key.
I also have the Text Box Size option set to “Changes”, as this can sometimes be helpful when there are a lot of possible synonyms where the synonyms are different in length - or as you mention when the translation is off or contextual. I find that in a number of situations this can work in place of having to enter hints to narrow down synonyms or loose translations.
In short, I make use of all of the options available to make it that little bit easier to help narrow down the possible answer for the cloze, and then to not have the sentence reset due to some (often accidental) minor spelling error.
I understand that some people might not want to use these types of hints when entering the clozes as they want to thoroughly test themselves, and that’s all well and good if that’s what people want.
In my case, for the hint tools that you mentioned (colour and one or two letter off) I consider that since we live in a world where most people have spell checkers and autocorrect tools on when writing emails and documents, I don’t see any reason to not use similar tools to help with typing accuracy when learning languages on a computer. This isn’t to say that I’m not interested in correct spelling and word forms, but rather this is about being able to use digital entry methods in an efficient manner.
Thanks for raising the topic. I always like to see how other people are using the numerous tools that Clozemaster makes available to us.
When I can’t find the solution without the “typing color hint”, I try to figure it out with the “typing color hint” like you do (and as a last resort, use the “single letter hint” to tell me the first letter), and then reset the word (by default to 0%, or you can manually edit the sentence to change the percentage to 25%, 50% or 75%).
In that sense, the hints help my learning. Because instead of saying, “I don’t know the answer, I give up, now show me the answer immediately,” I first invest some more effort before I look at the solution. (In almost all cases, it’s obvious which of the four multiple choice words is the solution; I immediately recognize the correct word once I see it, and the multiple choice problems are besides too easily solved, as I previously remarked.)
My reasoning for resetting the sentence is that I’d rather have a vocabulary of 3000 words that are second nature to me than a vocabulary of 10,000 words of which I regularly forget large parts.
I try to understand the sentence structure and all the words in the sentence. I sometimes spend a lot of time on one sentence. I do use the red / green color hints. But my goal is to understand the sentence and why it is structured that way and understand all the words in the sentence.
If I don’t know a word, I click on the boxes to show the choices. Almost always, I know what the word is from the four shown. At that point, you can still type in a word for the practice.
My settings are like zzcguns, Enter Submits Empty to “Off“ and Text Box Size option set to “Changes”. For many sentences, I might know 5 words or more that match the translation. I don’t want to have to cycle through them all. Knowing the approximate size helps narrow it down.
I don’t use the one letter hint ever, just because it doesn’t help me. If I don’t know the word, 1 letter doesn’t help me. If I don’t know the word, I click on the boxes and see if I recognize the whole word.
The other thing that I do is change the translations if they are wrong (uncommon) or if they are British English (not so uncommon) or sometimes just plain odd. I don’t make it an exact match or too easy. But I do want to be able to translate it. There have been English translations that I don’t even know what they are trying to say. I understand that no one else sees my altered translations but me. Example: “He looks mad“ but mad = fou (crazy). The Brits say mad, but here in the US mad means angry. So I changed mad in the translation to crazy. I’m here to learn French, so I make it work for me.
Never looked at it that way. I think I might have lost sight of the real goal because I was feeling overwhelmed by the number of reviews that always pile up, especially due to transitioning from legacy fast track to new fast tracks. Thanks for the reminder!
Using Listening, if I really can’t hear the word after a couple of attempts, I resort to the first letter help, and “Ah, of course!”, it all comes clear and I repeat it out loud so I get it next time.
This might sound crazy, but I don’t stress too much about completing all the reviews.
I change how I do the reviews and have tried different ways to do them. Right now, I have review settings set to:
Play review sentences ordered by percent mastered, 0% first.
I set “Max reviews per round when playing new sentences“ to 50% of the number of sentences that I am doing at a time. If the Sentences Per Round = 20 sentences, the Max Reviews would be 10. If I have more time to study, I might set the Sentences Per Round to 50 and then I set the Max reviews to 25.
In all the databases, there are already words that I know very well. If I know the answer immediately and can type it in without error, I set it to 100% mastered. I don’t need to study those much. If I’m reviewing a word that is set to 100% and I don’t know it perfectly, I change the review setting to lower - no higher than 75%, lower if needed. (Because of my review settings, I should see those lower percentage sentences sooner than the ones marked 100% mastered.)
There is a bug with my keyboard that sometimes one key will cause that item to crash and fail. (Long story, don’t ask lol) I reset those sentences to whatever they were at when it crashed, or what I think is the right number.
If it is a difficult sentence for any reason and I want to spend more time on it, I copy it to a collection that I created called HARD. I do all the reviews in this database every day. It is a small collection so it usually isn’t a high number.
I work in more than 1 collection at a time because I learn better that way. The more times that I see a word over time, the faster I will learn it. That’s just me. I hope I have explained this well.
I may change how I do it in the future. I like this for myself right now and the way that I learn. YMMV. Thanks for asking this.
I don’t worry too much about reviews either and generally pick and mix from Collections and elsewhere, particularly Verbs, saving tricky answers under Favourites for repetition. I love the variety Cloze offers.
I never manually set a word to 100% at first try even if I get it right, just in case I could use reinforcement. I might take a page out of your book and try using manual adjusting of % mastered.
At the second or third round, I will mark-as-known those words I know for sure and can easily recall/use without any difficulty. I do wonder sometimes if I am too hasty in marking a sentence as known, but I don’t think about it too much since I don’t do it too often.
I currently have almost 9K words to review, down from 13K. I am a little OCD and have a hard time ignoring them, but what I have done is ignore the legacy fast track collection reviews and focus on the new FFT reviews since I’ve transitioned from legacy to new. I wish there was a way to hide an entire collection from review but I don’t think that exists?
It doesn’t sound crazy that you don’t stress much about the review. It’s just that it’s a skill that I have not yet acquired!
I have only recently started marking words at 100% right away. In the Most Common Words section alone, there are more than 70,000 sentences. So I don’t have to worry about running out of material. I knew a lot of the words in one of the collections (colors and months, etc, basic things) so I was a little more aggressive with those.
