Starting a language on Clozemaster as a complete beginner

Language Learning
#1

When I started the English to French pair on Clozemaster, I was already familiar with the language a little bit from having taken a semester long class at the French Institute and also having studied the grammar on my own using books/duolingo etc.

I am considering starting one or two more languages, and I would be starting as complete beginner. (Japanese & Spanish or Japanese & Italian) I feel Clozemaster was immediately effective for me at the beginning because I wasn’t a complete newbie in French and could recognize basic sentence structures.

I speak English and Korean fluently and am comfortable in French, so I suspect I will detect some grammatical similarities in Spanish/Italian from knowing French/English. For Japanese, I hear the grammar is very sinmilar between Japanese and Korean but I don’t know any Japanese characters.

I am wondering if I should start with a grammar book first for the new languages and then get into Clozemaster to build up vocabulary. What is your experience? Has anyone started at zero on Clozemaster? Any advice would be appreciated.

#2

I can’t imagine starting from zero at Clozemaster, but it’s an experiment you could try easily enough. I would characterize what you’d be doing as inducing pieces of information about the language rather than learning it. Picking up a new language is hard enough when you can take advantage of all the work that an author has done in presenting the language in an organized way to you. It’s so easy to find introductory material in the languages you want to learn that I don’t see why you would skip that step, other than to perform an experiment that I would guess you would give up quickly. But feel free to prove me wrong!

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#3

It’s absolutely possible to start with Clozemaster as an absolute beginner, but it’s not the easiest way to learn a language from scratch. Nor the most efficient way (probably).

I can say that because I started learning Spanish with Clozemaster having had no prior knowledge of Spanish at all. :slight_smile: Some guy who already knew multiple other languages studied Japanese from scratch with Clozemaster, and look at his Clozemaster profile!

If you need a lot of hand-holding or a structured approach, starting from zero with Clozemaster is not for you. If you’re the “building the airplane as you fly it” type of person, then try it. What’s the worst that could happen? :slight_smile: That you realize that you need to buy a grammar book to study in parallel to Clozemaster? :slight_smile: Then nothing was lost.

Learning Spanish for a while now, I still struggle with the grammar. The Spanish words look familiar by now and I can select the correct solution from the “multiple choice” mode, but I cannot yet do “text input” as I can with my other language which I started using Duolingo before I started practicing it with Clozemaster. (Although I think that multiple choice is way too easy.) Had I solely relied on Clozemaster, I would still not know when to use the Spanish conjugations “hago”, “hace”, “hice”, or “hizo”, as an example. What I would know by now is that they all stem from “hacer”, but you definitely need to create your own flashcards (for example, in Anki) to practice verb conjugations on your own. And study the grammar using resources other than Clozemaster. For vocabulary, Clozemaster remains king though. :slight_smile:

If you find a good Spanish grammar resource, post it in this topic.

The previously mentioned guy who learned Japanese had let Reddit decide which language he should learn next (they chose Japanese). Before he started, he analyzed all the Kanji in the Clozemaster course. At the 100-days-mark, he gave a status update. He was very happy with his progress, having started Japanese without prior knowledge. In his opinion, Clozemaster is an awesome tool to quickly bring you (from zero) to the level at which you can watch japanese shows with subtitles. Clozemaster brought him to the point of having a reading vocabulary much faster than any course or book could have done, he thinks. And once you can understand/read Japanese subtitles, the real fun begins in case you enjoy anime. And, regarding Japanese, you definitely need to complement Clozemaster with watching media and/or reading books to develop a natural way of speaking Japanese because the Japanese sentences on Tatoeba (Clozemaster’s source) are often very weird, according to him.

All in all, what you’re considering to do is absolutely doable.

If you’ll enjoy the approach of stumbling your way through sentences without understanding the grammar, you have to answer for yourself.

Whether this approach is the most efficient way to wholly learn a language is debatable.

To repeat my point: Starting with Clozemaster and no prior knowledge, you won’t be able to speak Spanish with someone because you won’t know if you should say “hago”, “hice”, or something else. But when you’ll read “hice”, you’ll recognize the infinitive “hacer” and know from context that somebody is or was doing something.

So if you should first go through a grammar book before starting with Clozemaster probably depends on what your goal is:

  • to speak Spanish in a dialog
  • to read a Spanish book or subtitles
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#4

I guess it comes down to what one means by “starting a language on Clozemaster”. I originally read it as using Clozemaster as one’s only tool in the initial stages of learning. But it sounds like you and qzorum (the author of the reddit post) are interpreting it to include using it as your primary tool, with simultaneous use of other tools as well. In that case, I agree that it could work, for certain people, though it’s not the path I would choose.

Personally, I enjoy going through a good language textbook. I appreciate the work that the author puts into:

  • grouping sentences into dialogues, stories, and essays on a theme rather than throwing random sentences at you (which is what you get at Clozemaster)
  • presenting grammar topics incrementally, so that you can focus on one thing at a time
  • presenting vocabulary incrementally, so that you see the most common words first (which, to be fair, Clozemaster can do, but not as exclusively)

I think the more exclusively one relied on Clozemaster at the initial stages of learning a language, the less efficient one would be. For some (I would say most) people, this would bring them past the personal limits of time and energy that make the approach doable. But if a person has sufficient time and energy, and something to gain by choosing an inefficient approach (a sense of challenge or exploration, perhaps coupled with the desire to generate a series of posts and videos, as qzorum did), then I can see how it could work.

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#5

I agree with you.

To me it means to begin using Clozemaster before you completed Duolingo or any other language class.

  • When I started learning Swedish, Duolingo was still kind of good.
  • By the time I wanted to learn Spanish, Duolingo was gamified garbage.
    • Had Duolingo not been enshittified, I would have started with Duolingo before I fast-forwarded to using Clozemaster.

I do notice that I’m much slower and less efficient with Spanish than I was with Swedish. I simply lack too much knowledge that a class or grammar book would have taught me. Sure, I can piece together those missing pieces incoherently one by one as I go by searching the internet for them myself, but a coherent, guided course would have been more efficient. Then again, with Spanish I skipped the months I invested into using Duolingo, giving me a “head start” regarding the vocabulary, which needs to consist of thousands of words before you can have real conversations that go beyond the basic “Hello, my name is …. What’s your name?” that you learn in a grammar book. I don’t know if that cancels each other out.

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#6

Thank you @davidculley. I meant how you read it. I should have phrased my question better - the ultimate question was do I start using Clozemaster from the very start, along with other things, or do I wait a bit until I have basic understanding of the grammar (I do know some kanji’s but not how they are pronounced in Japan) and then take up Clozemaster. I guess the natural next question is, how long do you wait, but I will think about that later.

I love the Practice Makes Perfect series by McGraw Hill and have done multiple books for French. I am doing “Subjunctive up close and personal” now, and it has been a great refresher on subjunctives, for example. I am already excited about buying this series for whatever next language I decide to learn.

Duolingo - I agree. I still do it for French because it is more multi dimensional than Clozemaster, but I spend 15 minutes on it per day. I hear Lingodeer is better, so I might try that for Japanese.

Enshittification - never heard of this word. Firmly in my vocabulary now. Thank you for that - it will come in very handy some day!

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#7

Sorry I was vague in my question. I totally agree with you and have more French language books than I have time for because I also really enjoy learning with a textbook and doing the exercises.

My goal is to be able to communicate, so I will be repeating what I did with French - books, Duolingo or Lingodeer, Clozemaster and 500+ hours of conversation on italki. That’s what it took for me to be able to converse comfortably in French, so I presume that’s what it will take me for Spanish. I am not one of those people that can speak while making a lot of errors. It took a loooong time for me to feel confident in French. I have to know all the rules before I can utter a sentence. I wish I could overcome it but I know myself, so I just need to get myself to a point where I feel confident with my grammar. Thus a lot of books!

Clozemaster was a gamechanger for me for French, so I know it will be a valuable tool for my next language. I just didn’t know when to make it an integral part - at the beginning or at a later time.

Having said all that, I did wonder what the process would be like if someone were to start from zero on Clozemaster. And the Japanese experiment that @davidculley pointed out, is fascinating and makes me think that he is a language learning pro. Although I am tempted, I am not a pro language learner, so I will stick to the traditional method.

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#8

For Japanese, I recommend starting with the excellent Japanese From Zero books. Next, do the highly recommended Genki books. Then you can start thinking about using Clozemaster or using books dedicated to learning Kanji. That’s at least how I will go about studying Japanese once I feel sufficiently fluent in Spanish to integrate yet another language into my daily routine. One shouldn’t overburden oneself by attempting to do too much at once, such as learning two completely unfamiliar languages in parallel.

It’s the word of the year 2023. It was coined by the excellent Cory Doctorow in this blog post of his.

Click here to read more about enshittification

Although the notion of ever worsening services and products was, of course, long known before 2022, Doctorow gave us an apt name to refer to the result of the inevitable management practices driven by the insatiable greed of investors that you get once a startup raises capital or gets acquired.

It’s a word you should definitely know when you want to understand what is happening and will happen in the 21st century.

Enshittification - Wikipedia

You can even argue that the sole job of a CEO is to enshittify the company’s products as much as he/she can get away with. If you think from this perspective, you’ll have a much better understanding of the 21st century.

It’s also one of the reasons why I’m so adamant in opposing the integration of generative AI (see Please consider removing the Explain feature entirely).

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#10

Getting started with new languages is what I’m here for. In my early language learning days I liked to focus on grammar because that allowed me to be lazy with vocabulary but now I’m all vocabulary first kinda guy. As long as the vocabulary comes with context, like in cloze sentences, you will start to grasp the grammar on the side regardless and then once you do take a peek into a grammar book you’ll remember the stuff much better as it’s more like reviewing your own conjectures and filling in the context instead of given set of rules to remember.

Here’s my pipeline:

  1. For the first 6k - 10k sentences I do listening only. You hear the sentence, likely a couple times, and try to repeat it as accurately as you can while trying to figure out what it means before showing the sentence.

  • If it’s a foreign writing system, stick to multiple choice. Take a good look at the text but don’t sweat about it; you’ll get enough exposure to make the switch to reading over time.*

  • If you know the script go ham with text input day 1. Why wouldn’t you?*

  • As you start mastering the first sentences and feel autopilot kicking in switch the reviews to transcribe (or text input first if you weren’t already, of coure) to keep this batch of sentences engaging.

  • NB! Arguably Clozemaster isn’t the best place for this step because ideally you’d want actual native speaker audio at first to avoid sounding like robot once you start speaking with people. Especially if it’s a language you don’t hear spoken outside of CM.

  1. Once you’re done learning the most common words by ear switch to learning new vocabulary from text. This will force you to pay more attention to grammar and its exceptions and as you get deeper the words you learn will most likely pop up mostly while reading anyway.

  • Text input only, you gonna learn how to write!

  • Start creating your own custom cloze while you’re at it. If you see some cool new word or grammar structure or idiom in the piece of media you’re consuming, make that sentence into a cloze.
    (Pokedex entries are a goldmine for this stuff, for example. Concise yet detailed and interesting pieces of text with extremely memorable context)

  1. Review, review, review, as you shift your focus to actually consuming media as well as output.

  • Utilise custom collections to enhance your output practice. If you want to write about something, create a collection with sentences about the topic to and play those to have relevant vocabulary fresh in memory once it’s time to write etc.

  • Experiment with the reviews. Do text or listening, whichever you feel more lacking. Throw in some speaking (speak the full sentence).

–

*As much as I hate the multiple choice to even exist as an option for cloze exercises, it can be a solid option for getting your listening comprehension and vocabulary in as long as you actually focus on listening and learning instead of thinking of CM as a game for points. For Japanese, I haven’t done any cloze or output whatsoever up until now and the progress has been great throughout the core 10k and beyond. Doing proper text input cloze as you’re learning vocabulary will certainly make the transition to actual (written) output down the line smoother but if you struggle with text input it might not be worth the squeeze (at first). Doing listening with multiple choice will oftentimes completely trivialise the exercise (if it’s four different words and only one makes any sense to what you heard, assuming you can read the script…) but that’s ok. It’s what happens before you make the sentence visible that matters; you hear a new sentence with a new word and try to piece it together.

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