Hi All. My apologies if this is redundant. What is the primary point of study–the sentence, or the word in the box? Often, the word is extremely easy, and I want to mark it as ‘mastered,’ but sometimes the verbiage of the sentence is challenging. If the word in the box is crazy easy (casa, amigo, etc.), can I click mastered? What is mastered? The word? The sentence? Thank you!
2 Likes
I normally consider a sentence mastered when I’m comfortable with the whole sentence; if there’s something still to learn then it’s worth continuing with it.
3 Likes
For me, it’s the word IN THE CONTEXT of the sentence. This is particularly important in Italian where the form of the word (of any type; verb, noun, adjective, adverb, article) can vary according to the rest of the sentence’s context. I don’t think there is a lot of value to looking at individual words as such.
In French, on the other hand, I just put up a verb conjugation table on the wall and throw darts at it until I hit the right one enough times. 
2 Likes
Thank you for your insight. I did that at first, then I thought I was supposed to only focus on the word in the box. Big mistake! I’m glad I asked in my first week, so I didn’t get too far behind. Thank you again!
2 Likes
Lucius, thank you! I will from now on examine the whole sentence, and make sure I understand any idioms as well as the verb tense. Looks like I was too confident with that ol’ ‘mastered’ button.
1 Like
This is of course highly individual. My method is to save different parts of interesting sentences to my private collections, not just single words but also longer fragments. It seems that I need a separate cloze for each interesting aspect of a sentence to fully remember it.
In that way I can freely “master” each cloze individually, not having to think of the whole sentence.
2 Likes
@cityotter in addition to the helpful feedback you’ve already received, I just wanted to say too that there’s a heap of customisation settings available in Clozemaster, to make things more “challenging” and to help shift focus from the cloze word, onto the whole sentence and context.
For instance, it could be that you are just getting started on the Fluency Fast Track, but would indeed already know the first hundreds, or perhaps even couple thousands of words. However, you can for instance use “Speaking” as a review mode, and say the whole sentence out loud, or use “Listening” as a “Playing”/“Review” mode, especially in combination with not (immediately) displaying the translation of the source sentence, so you are sort of forcing yourself to comprehend the entire sentence in the target language. There’s also text input instead of multiple choice of course, where you can make the text boxes all the same size too.
Give a shout if you’d like some help identifying where to change these settings, if you’ve not already set them up as such anyway. And most importantly, enjoy 
4 Likes
wow, that’s a cool idea! I didn’t even know we could do that. Thank you!
2 Likes
All in all, it’s a question of personal preference. Try different things and choose what feels most comfortable to you. Clozemaster is a tool, you choose how to use it.
You don’t even have to set a solid “once and for all rule” if you don’t feel like it. I sometimes put a sentence as mastered directly because I feel it’s overly complicated and not interesting at my stage of learning. Other times, I intentionally put 75% sentences back to 50%, even though I got them correct (and should thus have them mastered), because I feel like their structure is really general and they’re great sentences to have in mind.
An other example is I always play listening mode + multiple choice, but I actually always repeat the sentence out loud and write it on a sheet of paper (useful for chinese characters), before selecting the correct choice if I wrote right, or intentionally choosing a wrong one if I wrote wrong. So, really, do as fits you best.
3 Likes
Is there an option to randomly assign cloze words within a collection? That would be a great way to freshen things up. Otherwise you can put the sentence in a private cloze collection and choose your own cloze word.
If I’m interested in learning a certain word or expression (or various forms of a word) then I search for several examples and put these in a collection. I really need to see the same word in various contexts before it will start to slip out of my mouth when speaking. So this word-level activity really involves the whole sentence, or at least phrases thereof, and I want to allow my brain to digest whole phrase units.
5 Likes
I still have so much to learn about how to use Cloze. I love it a lot and actually find it quite addicting. I didn’t know you could choose to make words a close. Are you saying you can input a sentence and make a word be clozed?
I think it’s only possible using a browser; at least the Android app is fairly limited in this respect.
This screenshot shows how to create a new close from an existing one (you activate the popup by clicking on your word of choice):
You can even select a number of words and create a multi-word cloze (but that does not work on touch-screen devices).
There are other methods as well, to add clozes in a more systematic way, but that’s another story.
4 Likes
Oh, that’s so cool! That takes my learning to a whole new level. Thank you so much, morbrorper!
2 Likes
I find it easier on ipad, just de-cloze and then double-touch word to make a cloze. But i also use browser. btw i think this can only be done with a sentence in your own collection.
1 Like