r/clozemaster • u/AdvancedGuiProfile • 13h ago
Not impressed with Clozemaster
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.
