Clozemaster Pro and Speakly.me

[Mount Everest]

What are your thoughts on the paid versions of Clozemaster PRO and Speakly.me?

How good and effective are they?

Can anyone say if they have been using them for a specific language and how it has helped them in that language?

What level do you think Clozemaster is more appropriated to if we take into consideration CEFR? Early stages of A1? After A1? A2?

Does anybody here use the PRO features?

I have no prior experience with Speakly.me. Is it really worth its (expensive) price?

I have been using Clozemaster so far, and it is working pretty well with me for some specific languages. After studying Portuguese, I think Spanish, Galician and to a lesser extent, French, Italian and Catalan come at easy, if compared to other languages from other family groups.

More specifically, after achieving a higher level in Portuguese, I could start the other Romance languages just by having fun with Clozemaster. I mean, before I started studying Spanish more seriously with other materials, I think I have already learned more than 500 words in Spanish and Galician and about 300 in French and Italian.

[Cavesa]

Clozemaster:
Very good from 0 to B2 or even more.
The Pro functions are nice but I don't find them absolutely necessary. But I think the price is reasonable, so why not.
I haven't tried the new functions, like grammar practice, but they might be worth it.
The only catch: various quality of the individual language combinations, based on the Tatoeba database for them. Some languages have tons of content, some have little.

That Speakly product doesn't look bad, thanks for the tip. I am trying it. It teaches fewer words than Clozemaster, but it looks well thought out.

[Beli Tsar]

Clozemaster:
The only catch: various quality of the individual language combinations, based on the Tatoeba database for them. Some languages have tons of content, some have little.

How useful have people found Clozemaster for languages where there aren't enough sentences to provide any kind of ordered progression track?

I've messed around with it for Persian, but at the beginning it felt too tough because of this. Even now I wonder how useful it is - just having random sentences fired at you, rather than carefully-ordered ones. But I haven't tried for long, so it would be good to hear from those with more experience.

[Gordafarin2]

I've been using Clozemaster for just a little while for Persian, and it's a fun diversion. Not a main pillar of my study, but I do it a few times a week. They really have gamified the living daylights out of it, which I have to say helps with motivation (only 20 more points to the next level! Keep up your streak, stay on the leaderboard!).

My level is high enough that it doesn't help for vocabulary. So am I learning much from it? Maybe not... I was already using Tatoeba sentences in an Anki deck, so I've been practising this sort of material already. I like to think it helps with fluency and immediacy. And the cloze format helps my instincts for grammar (example: ___ هتل‌های
هم هستند که توصیه کنی؟ - the answer is دیگری with the ی, easy to miss for non-natives).

I do it during 5-minute breaks at work, and I figure it can't hurt. But it's definitely a better platform for the bigger languages... I tried it out with Mandarin - Text-to-speech, sentences ordered by HSK level... pure luxury!

[Beli Tsar]

My level is high enough that it doesn't help for vocabulary. So am I learning much from it? Maybe not... I was already using Tatoeba sentences in an Anki deck, so I've been practising this sort of material already. I like to think it helps with fluency and immediacy. And the cloze format helps my instincts for grammar (example: ___ هتل‌های
هم هستند که توصیه کنی؟ - the answer is دیگری with the ی, easy to miss for non-natives).

So do you think you gain more from doing clozes with clozemaster, or the same sentences in an anki deck? Or is the main attraction gamification and ease of use (both of which are very good things)!

[Gordafarin2]

My level is high enough that it doesn't help for vocabulary. So am I learning much from it? Maybe not... I was already using Tatoeba sentences in an Anki deck, so I've been practising this sort of material already. I like to think it helps with fluency and immediacy. And the cloze format helps my instincts for grammar (example: ___ هتل‌های
هم هستند که توصیه کنی؟ - the answer is دیگری with the ی, easy to miss for non-natives).

So do you think you gain more from doing clozes with clozemaster, or the same sentences in an anki deck? Or is the main attraction gamification and ease of use (both of which are very good things)!

I think the clozes are definitely useful... Of course you can set up clozes in Anki too, if you want to put in the effort. With Clozemaster they're set up for you, so it's lower effort, but also sometimes the system is a little dumb - like clozing out proper names. Or sometimes the multiple choice options contain English words...

It's hard for me to say which is better. I wonder if others have opinions on this:
- My Anki sentence cards are set up with the TL sentence on the front, and the meaning and sometimes vocabulary/notes on the back. My focus is on understanding the sentence as a whole.
- Clozemaster shows the TL sentence and the English translation together. My focus is on guessing the clozed word (preferably before reading the English or looking at the choices). So it's a little more active, I guess?

[Expugnator]

For Clozemaster, size matters.

It's really easy to pick up a language from a known family, not even passively but also actively.

Graded sentences are always better and that's why I stuck to clozemaster while never actually following Anki.

If it's a language you're starting really from scratch, then the level shouldn't be too small so as not to allow much learning to take place or too large as to keep you stuck forever in a level. Somewhere between 1000 and 2000 sentences per sublevel is the way to go according to my experience. The Hungarian deck is too short, the Turkish one too extended.

As for Speakly, I only use it for Estonian. The sentences are well-curated and mostly fairly idiomatic and useful but the gradation is erratic. After the very few early ones, you start getting long and short, hard and easy sentences without an apparent criterium, almost as if you were doing Clozemaster random. The real live and listening exercises are a charm, at least for less-common languages like Estonian. Nothing you wouldn't get for free for any of the FIGS. I've paid for an all-time account and I'm really looking forward for it to pay off by means of them adding unique languages.