Clozemaster alternative: when fill-in-the-blank stops working

Clozemaster is good at one thing. It shows you a sentence with one word missing, you fill the gap, and the sentence comes back later. It's free to play, covers 50+ languages, and a lot of people burn through thousands of sentences before they start wondering why they still can't read a real article.

That moment is usually when people search for an alternative. The useful question is what exactly stopped working, because the answer changes which tool you want.

How Clozemaster actually picks your words

This part explains most of the complaints, so it's worth knowing.

From Clozemaster's own FAQ:

• Every sentence comes from Tatoeba, a volunteer-built sentence database released under CC-BY.
• The blank is the rarest word in the sentence that still falls inside the language's top 10,000 words. So you're always drilling "the hardest of the most common."
• Reviews run on fixed intervals: 1 day, 10 days, 30 days, 180 days. Four correct answers in a row and the sentence counts as mastered. Pro users can change the intervals.

Each of those is a sensible design choice. Each one also sets a limit.

Three reasons people leave, and what fixes each

1. The sentences don't feel like anything

Tatoeba sentences are short, standalone and written to illustrate usage. "Tom didn't want to go." You can guess the blank from grammar alone after a few hundred rounds, and nothing you read connects to the next sentence.

Fix: move to connected text. A news article, a blog post, a chapter. The words you meet there come with a situation around them, and that's what makes them stick. If you still like the cloze format, Anki has a built-in cloze note type, and you can make cards from sentences you found yourself instead of a shared database.

2. You got fast at the game, not at the language

After a while your speed goes up and your reading doesn't. That's the multiple-choice mode doing its job: recognising the right option out of four is a much easier task than understanding a sentence you've never seen.

Fix: switch to text mode if you haven't, and then start spending part of the time on real reading. Our rule of thumb for when material is too hard is in should I look up every word when reading.

3. The review pile stopped making sense

Fixed intervals don't know you. A word you've always known and a word you keep missing both come back on the same 1/10/30/180 schedule. Once you have a few thousand sentences in rotation, that gets noisy.

Fix: a scheduler that adapts per item. FSRS is the current standard for this, and Anki ships it (you have to switch it on in deck options). If you want the idea without Anki itself, here are the other ways to get spaced repetition.

The alternatives, by which problem you have

If your problem is…	Try	Why
Sentences feel empty	Reading real text with lookups	Words arrive in context you care about
You want cloze, but your own sentences	Anki cloze cards	Same format, your material
You want it free and self-hosted	Lector	Open-source take on the Clozemaster idea
Reviews feel random	Any FSRS scheduler	Intervals adjust per word
You mainly want listening	Language Reactor on YouTube	Real speech, clickable subtitles

Clozemaster vs Duolingo, Clozemaster vs Anki

Two comparisons come up a lot, so briefly.

Clozemaster vs Duolingo: Duolingo teaches you the basics in a sequence. Clozemaster assumes you have them and throws vocabulary volume at you. People often use Clozemaster after finishing a Duolingo tree, which is roughly the right order.

Clozemaster vs Anki: Clozemaster is ready-made cloze with fixed intervals. Anki is an empty box with a better scheduler. Clozemaster wins on setup time, Anki wins once you want control over what you review.

Neither solves problem #1. That one only goes away when you read things you'd read anyway.

Where we fit

Mossglen (full disclosure: ours) is a free Chrome extension for the "I want real text" end of this. Open any article, switch to a clean reading view in the original language, tap a word for the meaning. It saves the word with the sentence it came from, so your review deck is made of your own reading. Reviews run on FSRS. A short quiz after each text keeps the next one near your level.

What it isn't: a sentence game. There's no streak of 4-option rounds, and it won't hand you 10,000 sentences. The web is the material.

Should you quit Clozemaster at all?

Not necessarily. If you're past beginner and need raw vocabulary volume, 15 minutes of Clozemaster a day is fine. The mistake is letting it be your only input. Once you're around the level where newspapers become readable, the sentences start costing you more time than they give back.