watervole | learning German

Being more awake at the moment, as I'm gaining on heath stuff, I have enough brain cells functioning to be able to resume my occasional hobby of learning German.

Duolingo irritates me - I always end up using it for a few days and then dropping. Too many unnecessary key clicks, too many bouncy owls, limited vocabulary and very little help with grammar.

Last week, by sheer luck, I came across Clozemaster, which for me, at least, is a much better way of learning a language. It uses sentences rather than words. They're real life sentences, eg.

Das ist doch nicht so einfach, wie ich <input ... >.

Not as easy as I thought.

All I have to do is to fill in the missing word. And I have the option of either a multiple choice of four words,or the hard mode in which I have to input the answer from knowledge/memory. I'm doing it the hard way, as I find it more interesting. My guess here was denke - but I'm not sure about the tense.... Indeed, the correct answer was 'dachte',

The 'explain' button tells me "dachte" is the verb "denken" (to think) in the simple past tense (Imperfekt) and first person singular, which translates to "thought" in English."

All of the words in this sentence have a full grammatical description. Not all Clozemaster sentences do yet, but all the ones in the set I'm currently using do, and they're expending this feature to more of their sentences.

There's also some interesting options for reading more complex texts (from German Wikipedia) with the option to highlight bits for Google Translate as you go (it's in the paid option which I decided to go for this morning, and I think I'm going to like this section).

Also available are audio clips of speech from the Common Voice project - voices of real people speaking German in a range of accents, etc.

Clozemaster isn't perfect. The sentences it uses are taken from Tatoeba which is an open-source translation project. The plus side is that you get colloquial language which feels very real. But there is a risk of an occasional error. (I've only found one so far, and it was pretty easy to spot. I think the original sentence on Tatoeba had been edited slightly, and the explanation had fallen out of sync with it.)

All in all, I'm finding it a lot more interesting and far less frustrating than Duolingo.

You can get quite a lot on the free option, but I don't think I'm going to regret paying.

They have a fair number of languages available, why not take a look? (Some language pairs are bound to work better than others, but I'd expect English to most things to have lots of sentences available)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh, thanks for the recommendation. I've almost finished the Yiddish Duolingo course and have been looking for Yiddish learning opportunities I can move onto next. It looks like Clozemaster offers Yiddish as one of their languages, so I'll try it out.

Clozemaster is definitely best for people who already know some of the language, so hopefully will work for you.

It's also definitely helping my German pronunciation. I had some common words very wrong...

I'm enjoying Duolingo Spanish, and the way it's introducing grammar. I think I'm going to keep going at that until I'm a lot less busy than I am right now. I do have an 'as and when' plan for expanding my language learning in due course, but I need to be able to prioritise it in a way that health and other purposes prevent right now.

That's really interesting, I'm also kinda burning out on Duolingo and want more information and context. I'll give it a try, thanks!

Let me know how you're getting on.

I just tried the (paid) option to have missing word sentences as part of articles from German Wikipedia - that was rapidly broadening in terms of vocabulary!

Overall, I'm finding the sentence approach to be really helpful. (and a lot more interesting/realistic)

What language(s) are you learning?

My son and I are learning Spanish, my daughter is learning Italian and my husband is learning Ukrainian! So I got the Duolingo family account for a year but may cancel if we like Clozure better.

Ironic really. I know several Ukrainians, will be board gaming with two of them this evening, but I'm always teaching them English off and on.
One has been living with us for the past year - but he had pretty good English when he arrived.
Some, I'm teaching pretty much from scratch, but it's amazing what difference even half a year can make.

I find Clozemaster is very colloquial when it comes to German, but the 'Explain' usually explains the derivation of the abbreviated words.

But I can do more formal language from the German Wikipedia entries it offers me.

Ah, you are so good...I still stick with Duolingo and it is good for my purposes and my learning pace. As for German, for some reason I can´t get into this language. I have already tried so many times and always failed to make progress...It is a shame because Germany and Austria are our neighbours...

Clozemaster has Welsh...

Interesting -- my instinctive 'fill in the gap' was "...wie ich glaubte", and on checking with the dictionary that *also* means "as I thought". I wonder what the differing nuance/usage is between the two?

I would translate 'glauben' as to believe.
Checking with Google translate, it agrees with me.

So, a different shade on the meaning

learning German

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