What does ”OE” stand for? Anyway, it looks like a name of a certain application. This should be removed from the lesson.

My guess would be Outlook Express.

Why should it? It’s perfectly fine to have abbreviations like these in sentences.

Besides, there are agglutinative languages, and it is useful to learn how they attach their suffixes to such abbreviations.

@pitti42
So, you are arguing that {{Ａｎｄｒｏｉｄ}} is also a good cloze lesson. It’s just written in a hideous Zenkaku (全角) horizontal style, which is not recommended and even hated by native speakers.

I’m not denying all unique nouns. For example, I believe {{アンドロイド}} converted into Katakana and {{泥}} as slang are good exercises for the translation of “Android”. But {{Ａｎｄｒｏｉｄ}} isn’t.

For the same reason, {{ＯＥ}} should be removed from a cloze-word.

I’m afraid you misunderstand the meaning of “agglutinative language. {{ＯＥ}} isn’t an exercise for learning how to conjugate a base word with a particle.

FYI: Tatoeba, especially sentences sourced from Tanaka Corpus, obsessively sticks to Zenkaku for no reason. You’d better avoid Latin alphabets and numbers in Zenkaku in horizontal writings.

You did not say it was the cloze-word.
It does of course not make much sense to have proper names as cloze-words.
It was also not clear what you mean by “lesson”, or that “lesson” apparently means to you the same as “cloze-word”.

Zenkaku or not, that was also not what I was talking about.

You basically said (or what I thought you meant):
“There should not be any obscure two-letter acronyms/abbreviations, that noone knows what they mean, in clozemaster’s sentences.”
And I disagree and said they are fine. It does not matter in the end what they mean.

As for agglutinative languages. You are right, OE is in this sentence not an example for that.
But for example Finnish appends its case suffixes like this:
“Olen katsomassa peliä TV:stä.” (I’m watching the game on TV.)

And I was saying that it is useful to learn how suffixes are attached to abbreviations, and so there’s another reason why you can’t just ban all abbreviations from clozemaster sentences.

Can you please be a little more constructive, specific, and less feisty? To be honest, I am so overwhelmed by your comments including on other sentence discussion pages. We are here to improve sentences and to better understand the language. SDs are not a battlefield.

I still don’t understand why {{ＯＳ}}のツールバーにボタンを追加・削除する is “useful to learn how suffixes are attached to abbreviations.” There is no meaningful abbreviation here. It merely converts OS in Hankaku to ＯＳ in Zenkaku. And OS/ＯＳ are not even used in the real world. There is no suffix in this sentence. There are particles. though, such as の, に, and を. But Clozemaster doesn’t offer such particles as a cloze-word.

The only possible phrase suitable for a cloze-word is {{追加・削除する}} as a compound verb when it comes to the aspect of an “agglutinative language”. We often use ・ (called 中黒 = なかぐろ) to make compound nouns and verbs. However, “add AND delete” isn’t an intuitive cloze-phrase for English speakers. So, Clozemaster usually splits such a compound word into {{追加}}・削除する or 追加・{{削除}}する. But again, these are feasible but not related to an “agglutinative language”.

The following message is directed to Clozemaster user report handlers, not to pitti42.

Let me rephrase and clarify my initial request for Clozemaster.

1. Both {{ＯＳ}} in Zenkaku and {{OS}} in Hankaku should be removed from the word frequency list that Clozemaster refers to, so that the system won’t automatically generate exercises with these cloze-words anymore.

2. All Latin alphabets and Arabic numerals should be converted from Zenkaku to Hankaku for the following two reasons:
   a) Native speakers hate and avoid Zenkaku in horizontal writings. Only newspapers use Zenkaku with no rational reason, and subscribers frequently complain about it. As a result, some of the newspapers changed the policy. For more information about the heated debate, please read this article.
   b) Clozemaster recently introduced the “embedding Wiktionary” pop-up. As I explained here, the new feature returns the “page not found” error many times in the Japanese course. No online dictionary writes Latin alphabets and Arabic numerals in Zenkaku, so it causes extra “page not found” cases. Hankaku works better for the pop-up.

Oh I was not specific enough? Maybe you just do not understand what I wrote?
There’s a word for the feeling I get, the longer our discussions take: “frustration”.
But actually, in this thread, so far I have been very neutral.

Now to the topic:

It is not. That’s why I said: “You are right, OE is in this sentence not an example for that.”

Let me rephrase what I was trying to say:

In your original post you said:

I told you that I interpreted this as

And everything else I wrote, and my whole point, was based on that understanding.
It is not about zenkaku (and I don’t actually disagree with your zenkaku arguments), it is not about OE being a useful cloze-word in this very sentence.
You dedicated two whole paragraphs to talking about something that completely missed my point.

My point was that I don’t think it is helpful to ban all seemingly nonsensical abbreviations from all clozemaster sentences.
And I even gave you two reasons as for why I think so. Which are:

1. They don’t hurt, because most of the time it does not matter what they mean.
2. With some languages, such as Finnish, it is useful because these languages attach case endings to abbreviations.

And by the way, the other impression I got from your original post is that you sounded like this:
“Oh, what’s this weird abbreviation doing here? I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean. This should not be there. Forum!!!”
And that’s presumptuous. Please kindly allow me to disagree.

Now with all that being said, I will end my participation in this thread as well.

Have a nice day.