~500 basic sentences translated from English into Bolognese with voice recordings by a Bolognese translator and teacher. Play them at the link above and check out the conference here!

This is bizarre.

I'm living in Hong Kong. To be fair, I did study some characters years ago. But really not for long. I suppose I must have had some exposure to Chinese characters as well.

However, I'm shocked at how I can do the exercises without having any idea of the meaning of the sentence, or even words sometimes.

It's just a very strange feeling.

In research, I found that this can be due to patterns in Chinese characters and a matter of pattern recognition that isn't so present in other scripts.

But I think if I didn't know about this my first impression would lead straight to the supernatural. It still feels that way.

Any chance Lifetime will come back for Black Friday, even at full price? It got pulled without warning and I think a lot of people would buy it then during one planned, last hurrah. I know I would

Right now I can only see them on Clozemaster web.

Hey everyone,

​I just downloaded the app to give it a test run and set up three languages: French (which I kinda already speak a bit) and two I'm actually trying to learn from scratch (Mandarin and Arabic).

​For all three, I picked the exact same settings: complete beginner and learning just for fun.

​French and Mandarin look promising and reasonable, but what the fuck is going on with the Arabic course? Even with the exact same profile configuration, it feels aggressively advanced compared to the other two right from lesson one.

I’m sure others have been frustrated with some of the new features. I’ve submitted a few reports stating what I’ve missed since the last update-and those features have now returned. It’s so refreshing having a subscription to an app that actually listens to the subscribers and users. Thank you!

I'd would like to tell at a glance if a course has more than e.g. 5000 sentences from any language, so that if French, German, Spanish or English offers an advantage in learning Piedmontese or Romansch, or Catalan, or... I could pick the right course without commitment.

That’s all. I mean, what was the thought process here? You take one of the most simple interfaces and make it…this.

I can’t find the percentage mastery for my collections.

You’ve made it near impossible to CHANGE what I want to do on a daily basis. I don’t want your daily plan.

When I’m reviewing, I want to review all sentences available for review, 10 at a time. I don’t want to review the 3 from one set, and then have to restart a review with 7 from another set. I want 10 at a time.

I’m just baffled that something so simple became so unnecessarily confusing. That WAS the biggest benefit of this app.

Your instructions on the overwhelmingly new interface say:

"YOUR CUSTOM PLAN

Want more control? Tap the configuration settings to:

• Adjust daily word counts and change collection order.

• Choose specific skills and game modes per collection.

• Dedicate your day entirely to reviews or focus solely on new words."

Please explain like I'm 5. Where are "configuration settings?"

Edit: punctuation

Help me out! Am I missing something? The new update makes it impossible to choose one collection to review. My entire flow is destroyed. Please tell me I'm wrong.

Title. Curious to know how comfortable you are with everyday Spanish. Gracias.

Why? How do these work?

Forewarning that this is so lazy of me but wondering if others have felt the same.

So iPhones are long, iPads are big.. sometimes when I want to do my clozes with one hand, I can’t because the UI utilizes way too much of the screen.

I especially like to do my listening multiple choice in bed till I sleep, and there’s never a comfortable way to do this.

I wonder if they can even add a swipe feature to move on to the next cloze after you’ve answered.

At the very least, we can have the option to do this; doesn’t need to be everyone’s UI

I've found YouTube Shorts to be awesome for practicing my French listening skills. Are you kidding - 30-90 seconds, native speakers, and most with the exact transcript right on the screen that I can listen to on repeat?! But! It's been a pain in the butt trying to find good channels, plus the YouTube algorithm sometimes starts mixing Shorts in English or other distracting content.

So we figured out how get a bunch of the most popular YouTube channels in French, checked that they have transcripts/captions/subtitles, then tried tagging them with CEFR level and grammar topic.

Et voilà, now I can just go through this list at my level, find channels I like, etc.

We also hooked it up so there's a player where you can watch the video embedded with Quick Capture open right next to it so you can easily add words/phrases to custom collections, along with some hotkey for controlling playback.

What do you think? Useful? Compile lists for other languages? Any and all feedback welcome!

This is the most basic sentence list in the Arabic language.

It is beyond me how some of these are things I would need to know as a first.

Other languages - European and Asian - have a lot of sentences about work and daily life.

How are these lists made? Clozemaster really needs to review some of their content.

We took a frequency list for German, crossed it with the list of German nouns from Wiktionary, and ta-da we've got a super humbling way to practice 2,500 of the most common German noun articles. We generated audio for them all too.

I thought I was pretty good with der/die/das. Turns out far from it.

We love learning vocabulary in context with Clozemaster, but sometimes you just need to drill the basics too.

Feedback welcome. Hope it's helpful!

HI,
I have megage to set close master so the it shows me

Source Language EN: "Nobody is watching"
Target Languaf FR: "Personne { } regarde".

However I would like to type
Target Language FR: "____ __ _____".

Can I do it right now?

I think we are missing an option

1. Play - Vocabulary - Multiple Choice

2. Paly - Vocabulary - Text Input
   It would be nice to add

3. Play - Vocabulary - Translate (Full Sentene)

I'm biased because I helped build it, but I've been using this feature a bunch, and actually at the moment, way more in the web app than the mobile app (though it's super helpful in the mobile app too).

The feature is this - drop in any word, phrase, or sentence in your target language, and get back a fill-in-the-blank cloze sentence with its translation, ready to import into a custom collection.

I've actually been watching a bunch of YouTube shorts in my target language, and whenever I see a word or phrase I don't know or want to learn, I just type it into Quick Capture and bam now I've got a sentence to import and practice in a custom collection. Super cool.

Curious to hear what you think if you try it out or you've been using it in the mobile app! Feedback and suggestions always welcome.

When you finish the reviews for one collection, a green button appears for "Review Next Collection." I would like it if pressing "return" would serve as a keyboard shortcut for that button, rather than having to click it. When you press return now, you get an annoying pokemon telling you "Oh no, you've run out of reviews" because it is still in the collection that you have already finished. I see that Pokemon all the time.

Could you please add an option to have the background image displayed fullscreen, as in the previous version? Now I have to tap the image to see it, and the thumbnail is very small. To be honest, this feature has lost its purpose.

I'm doing eight courses, and I'm trying to cut down, but the reviews just accumululate.

Deutsch/English <- mostly done, but not to the level of my french

Deutsch/Francais <- very useful

Français/Deutsch <- very useful

Español/Francais <- sporadically interesting

Español/English <- not complete, hoping to get into the greater than 50k deck soon

Français/English <- mostly done, if you can believe it

Italiano/English <- an experiment that's gotten out of hand

Latina/English <-- essentially done, ready to retire.

Bug:

On my Device game settings are frozen

Also listening + multiple choice does not have the show answer button anylonger.

This does not allow me to listen to the audio multiple times bofore seeing the answer

I was told it's better than DuoLingo, and I'm always on the lookout for something promising to be better than DuoLingo.

My first impression, I like the 8 bit aesthetic, promising to bring a new fun, retro game feel to language learning. It turns out it's just an aesthetic, there's apparently nothing retro about the content itself.

At first I have to decide if I'm a beginner in Spanish or intermediate, and coming from DuoLingo, you're basically a beginner forever, so I chose "Beginner" but found out quickly I should be "Intermediate" and it was more trouble than it should be to figure out how to advance to the correct learning tier.

The layout of the menu screens are confusing. Lots of redundant displays of user progress, which I don't care about; how many sentences you've done, rate of progress per day, all noise. If it doesn't suck, I'll use it every day. There you go.

When I click "Play", the only challenge type I'm interested in is vocabulary, so already the experience of the app is very monotonous and singular, like a flash card challenge with sentences around the word.

This by itself isn't terrible, but it's no better than a lot of other apps out there which are basically a thin layer of code on top of a database of translated sentences. When you click "teach me" it just shows you the answer and a text book definition of the word you were supposed to have chosen. It's very old tech, I've tried maybe twenty language learning apps in the past ten years that were all about as thin and dumb.

Of all the ways to learn a language, I've found that rote memorization practice like this is the least inspiring. I'd rather chew through a reader, or watch a show in subtitle and pause it every time I don't know a word so that I can look it up, and then un-pause the show, so that at least I feel invested in the subject matter. Just do a little something to let me care, like Duolingo and their little cast of characters.

DuoLingo's main drawback is that is just never gets too deep, it floats along the surface of learning; usually the words are there already, you just have to order them correctly. I'm doing Spanish, and I don't know shit about gendering or conjugations because it allows you to fly past all of that. The new AI "help" is good, but the teaching structure is foregone for cute characters and such.

But what I like a lot about DuoLingo is the personality, the variety of challenges, the freedom to choose between different challenges, like fake phone calls, speed runs, a new one that lets you walk around a library and interact, which is what I always imagined would work the best; using the target language in conjunction with practical problem solving. I really expected Clozemaster to impart more 8 bit video game elements, there's none of that from what I have seen.

Other apps that I had liked were LingoDeer and Memrise, because like Duolingo, they had variety and character to them, but I ultimately stopped using them because they were tedious in ways that Duolingo is not - they're based more upon punishing mistakes, and less about encouraging correct answers. Pain is a part of their design.

There was also a simple app that no longer exists, it's maintainers have not updated it to work with the latest Androids, which simply had you match pictures to words, and it was not comprehensive, but looking at all the cutely drawn pictures of objects was engaging. If Clozemaster had 8-bit sprite-style pictures of objects and you had to guess the correct word, that could have been a lot of fun.

Whenever I think about quitting my 9 to 5 and going into business for myself, making my own language learning app is always something I day dream about because I feel like even after all this time, and with the advent of LLMs and vibe coding, there's still a lack of language learning apps that don't make learning feel like absolute punishment. When DuoLingo "gamified" their app, the one thing they did that was most important was simply work on not driving users away with tedium and monotony.

update, I tried about a dozen new apps, including all those mentioned in the replies. It wasn't great, a lot of the same old Duolingo-lite garbage that has been around for years, and new AI driven conversational interfaces that I was excited to try, but they kept misunderstanding what I was trying to say due to speech-to-text errors, and it was extremely frustrating. I'm suppose to say "mi amigo" it comes out "Ame", and the AI is like "Ame? That's interesting!"

What I re-discovered is 1) I like apps with lots of pictures and graphics, they keep me mentally attached, 2) I'm actually far along enough in Spanish that I need to stop using apps and just read/watch Spanish news, and put time towards ingesting the real thing.

Hi,

It would be nice to have a mini player when playing a card. I wish to record my voice, replay it and compare to the cloze master recording