#unfortunately the radio mode of clozemaster is difficult to ger it to give u new words and reviews in a nice paced way

[rigelmejo]

Okay there are some poor fucking translations in modern Glossika japanese :c

Look. The old version, the old cd audio lessons, had less words and their language was more artificial learner textbook format (like Genki). But there was less errors.

At least 20% (one in 5) sentences has a translation that's partly or wholly wrong. Its a good thing Im not a true beginner, and can tell. Stuff that has a literal translation of "what would be a good thing to do?" (Which would help you fogure out the wood GOOD is in the sentence) is translated in the app as "what should i do?" Another sentence thqt they translated as "are you okay" would more literally be "your mood seems bad (warui)" so the learner is going to what... tjink warui means "okay'" if they didnt realize these translations are NOT literal.

I suspect these sentences are from Tatoeba or some mass online sentences database. Theres much less purposeful grammar in the sentences compared to the old course, and the translations are so much fucking worse. So much worse. 1 out of 5 sentences being translated wrong is too fucking many in a paid course! That's 20%! Thats a huge chunk of what you study! The old version had an occasional translation INTO japanese error, but it was more like 1 in 20 so like 5% of the sentences. I realize im complaining a lot, its just WILD how much worse these translations are compared to the old course, making it seem like they for some reason tjought literal translation (which helps word to word matching and grammat understandimg) is no longer worth the effort.

I suspect they took the sentences from tatoeba (or similar sentence banks), and then cut the sentences into smaller bits but didnt edit the source sentence's translations which were probably user submitted wherever the sentences are from. (Maybe glossika made up their own sentences, who knows, but if they made these translations themselves then wowwwww did their own work drop in quality).

So ive used Clozemaster app in the past. It used to be free. Now its monthly fee if you want to more than 20 sentences a day. Anyway, clozemaster intentionally used taboeta sentences and google translate and TTS for their HUGE bank of sentences. Initially, for a few years, these features were free for as many sentences as u want (they only limited sentences for free users around a year ago). The negative was Clozemaster sentences had more errors rhan PROFESSIONAL APPS like Pimsleur, Busuu, Glossika *cough*. The upside was that Clozemaster had SOOOO many words, so much variety of sentences from real reading materials so it was how the language was Actually used. It wasnt artificially easier like many apps, and that meant when you improved understanding in Clozemaster you also saw Noticeable progress in reading skills in your target language of stuff for native speakers. You saw formal and very informal sentences. For japanese, clozemaster was awesome for getring used to verb conjugations and formality in real language use. Clozemaster also improved over time: eventually you could translate word by word, so if google translate's auto generated sentence wasnt literal then you could click word by word to find the Actual literal sentence meaning, you could look up 1 word if you didny know it, you could look up kanji.

Glossika's current japanese course reminds me of Clozemaster. Except they cut out the sentence complexity, so it doesnt have the benefit clozemaster has. Glossika doesnt have a way to show the literal translation, so where Clozemaster gave alternatives when its own sentence translation wasnt useful... glossika just lets you flounder (or worse, learn something quite wrong). Glossikas course reminds me of if you found a random japanese learner sentences deck made by a beginner learner who used google translate and hoped it was right. And i say random deck, because the most common currently floating around japanese anki decks use mostly the Japanese iKnow sentences which were made to be educational and have few errors. Tango decks are also popular, again based on a learning material the Tango textbooks, so they have few errors in the translations.

My conclusion: lmao dont pay for the modern Glossika japanese course. I may keep doing it just to see how far I get in a month, since Ive done a lot with Clozemaster in the past (and it had its errors for a while) and i still made some progtess. Im just particularly bitter because as a professional resource, i really expected less fucking errors. I shouldnt have to be vigilant to catch errors in the first fucking 200 sentences every minute or so.

I guess I'd still recommend: Japaneseaudiolessons.com (free) then Satori Reader app (if you're going paid) or SmartBook Kursx app (free parallel text reader - the full sentence translations are good but the word individual ones are 20% wrong for japanese, which is fairly common with machine translation tools). And of course anki decks if you like anki. I would love to join Nukemarine's patreon, buy his Lets Learn Japanese anki decks, then go back to those since those truly made me progress IMMENSELY in a matter of months! But i cannot focus on something like anki right now, i know i cant. I wish i could get his LLJ decks, and then could figure out how to turn them to audio files with TTS english then the Japanese repeated twice.

If ANYONE is tech savy with converting anki decks to audio files (and adding TTS)? I WILL draw you a picture or something if you would be kind enough to help me make such audio files. Im completely serious. Ill go buy the decks right now if someone can help me make english-japanese sentence audio files with the deck. I have seen some reddit posts about converting an anki deck to audio file, but i didnt understand how to do the "add tts" step for english.