So I am curious. When is the best time to start doing Clozemaster. For languages I have never studied but are similar enough to English or other languages I have studied I can usually get 90% right, but am I learning anything or is it better to wait until I learn more vocabulary.
For example I have never studied Icelandic but have studied a little Norwegian,old English, and German and am a native English speaker. If I start playing the 100 first Icelandic vocabulary words I can easily get 98% right during a given playtime, and if I do get one wrong I learn it pretty quickly. Now is this worthwhile or should I wait until I study a bit more?
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I believe in the principle of sink or swim. Throw yourself into your task and if you don’t drown then you made the right decision. Otherwise, you can try doggy paddling to the edge of the language learning pool and then thank your lucky stars you made it out alive. Live your life like you mean it.
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I’d say it’s basically all down to whether you’re enjoying it or not. If you’re enjoying it, it’s never too early, something’s bound to stick, whichever method you’re using, but it seems to be especially the intention of a spaced repetition method, like is applied here in Clozemaster.
I tried Greek, a language I’m not familiar with at all (apart from of course being able to link certain words to certain derived words in other languages), and even just after doing a set of sentences twice (so getting them to 50 % mastered), some things stuck. And this was just using “Listening” + “Multiple Choice” so it was the easiest mode possible basically - by trying to find the word that corresponded to what I thought I heard (and still getting the odd cloze wrong).
I would personally just go for it, and would try out any language I don’t know yet on Clozemaster first, because most other language learning apps/methods tend to bore me no end, by always starting out with endless repetitions of mind-numbing sentences like “The woman eats the apple”, or having to click on pictures “Which picture shows a woman?”, “Which picture shows an apple?”, or starting off with perhaps slightly more useful conversational sentences “What’s your name?”, “I am …”, which arguably might get you to a conversational beginners’ level faster, but which still really don’t inspire me much, and I thus wouldn’t use, unless it’s just a quick crash course I’m doing for needing to be able to have basic conversational skills for an upcoming trip.
For any other purposes, I’d always want to learn the language to a much deeper level of understanding, and I’ve found that even exposure to the basic x most common words sentences, still can help instil some sense of grammar etc.
Just to add to that, I’ve been able to make more sense of dedicated grammar exercises elsewhere, after having spent more dedicated efforts here.
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One question to ask yourself is not just “Will I retain anything from Clozemaster at my current level of knowledge?” but "How does using Clozemaster compare to some other method of language learning that I might use at my current level of knowledge?
I personally like to start learning a language with a textbook, if I can find one that suits me. I like the experience of seeing the structure of the language laid out before me, with basic vocabulary presented to me systematically. Then I turn to Clozemaster when I reach a level where I’m ready to expand my breadth of vocabulary and practice it, along with grammar. I prefer starting out learning a language deductively (trying to construct valid utterances starting from a knowledge of principles) to purely inductively (trying to generalize from examples to principles).
But that’s me. Everyone needs to find a style of learning that works for them.
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I started playing a few sentences here almost immediately when I started Mandarin Chinese in February. I found it really enjoyable to recognise words I’d learned, even if I couldn’t understand the rest of the sentence. However, that was mostly for fun and I’ve spent the majority of my learning time on other apps (and more recently Italki lessons for pronunciation, which I should have started earlier).
I also set up my own collections here using sentences from Duolingo, LingoDeer and my Italki tutor, so I can easily practice the audio for those sentences.
Mandarin Chinese is a bit different to other languages I’ve played here in that it has a set of collections based on the HSK tests, which have set vocabulary. It doesn’t take long to learn the HSK1 and 2 vocab, which makes those collections more accessible than the 100 most common word collection.
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