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Hi Hacker News! My name's Mike. I'm the creator of Clozemaster. Clozemaster is language learning through mass exposure to vocabulary in context. The goal is to
by cmmike 10y ago
Hi Hacker News! My name's Mike. I'm the creator of Clozemaster.
Clozemaster is language learning through mass exposure to vocabulary in context. The goal is to fill in the missing word in a given sentence. The missing word is the most difficult word in the sentence according a frequency list for that language, and the sentences are from the awesome dataset at Tatoeba.
I started the site just under a year ago to answer the question "what should I do after finishing Duolingo?". Since then it's grown to support over 50 languages, mobile apps, and thousands of users. It's useful for learners at almost any level, from beginner to advanced, and makes a great complement to Duolingo, textbooks, classrooms, etc. to practice vocab in context.
You can play the Fluency Fast Track which gives you a sentence for each unique missing word in order of increasing difficulty, jump in to sentences grouped by frequency from the 100 most common words to the 10,000 most common, or just play random sentences. There's also "cloze-listening" - hear the sentence first, then see it and fill in the missing word.
Thought Hacker New might find Clozemaster interesting and hopefully useful! It's still very much a work in progress - I have a bunch more features planned and I'm working to improve it all the time. I'm also open to any feedback and happy to answer any questions!
- dwynings 10y agoClozemaster looks pretty cool. A couple notes: "the post-Duolingo learn language in context app" This was really hard for me to understand. When I skimmed this, my first assumption was that this was a direct replacement for Duolingo, when it's actually complementary. It would probably be better to split up the long list of languages on to 2 different pages. 1. Language you want to learn, and 2. From which language. An alternative would be to have a separate section for each language to learn on the page with space in between.
- cmmike 10y agoThanks for the feedback! Agreed on both points. I'm aiming to revamp the landing page within the next few months, definitely needs some work.
- Mithaldu 10y agoThe multiple choice mode is missing a button for "i don't know". I figured out you can hit enter to get the same, but i don't think everyone would. E: Gave it a bit more of a try, and i won't be switching this one. The japanese set doesn't seem to particularly try to avoid throwing unknown words at me when giving me new ones and the voice is uncomfortably high-pitched.
- tiglionabbit 10y agoYeah I'm doing the Japanese one now and it has a lot of unfamiliar kanji in it even on the lowest level. I never really learned much kanji.
- PhilAtHN 10y agoSeveral years ago I started something similar. The idea was to create cloze test flashcards. That never really took off, but some teachers liked the general idea so I rewrote it to become a cloze quiz creator tool which is now http://www.learnclick.com http://www.learnclick.com (it now offers much more than cloze quizzes). Congratulations Mike for coming up with something for the individual learner. I think having premade cloze sentences was what was missing with my original solution.
- tiglionabbit 10y agoI noticed something weird when doing Japanese. When you answer a question, it says the correct sentence out loud in one voice, but sometimes the voice says something different than what is written. Then when I click the play button, it says the sentence correctly but in a totally different voice. At first I thought I was just crazy, but this has happened at least 3 times in 3 "rounds" so far.
- tiglionabbit 10y agoHuh, after playing it a bit more, I've noticed that sometimes the hiragana it shows for the kanji in the sentence does not match the way either voice pronounces it.
- cmmike 10y agoThis issue is most likely the result of the hiragana being automatically generated and some kanji having different pronunciations based on context. I tend to trust the voices, and look up conflicting words in jisho.org to be sure. Ideally in the future I'll be able to get some kind of human moderation in place for checking the hiragana/pronunciations.
- tiglionabbit 10y agoYou'd think you could use whatever generates the voices to also generate the phonetics for the kanji.
- Nadya 10y agoThis is exactly the problem! :) For example for 「何」 you'll likely seen the kana written as 「なに」 instead of 「なん」 for 「何ですか」
- skosch 10y agoMike, this is super cool. Two requests: 1) Cantonese doesn't have a flag. Maybe just use the Hong Kong one, at the risk of upsetting the rest of Guangdong? 2) For hanzi-based languages, it would be super awesome if you could (optionally) display the romanizations as ruby annotations on top of the characters. I know romanizations are there, because they are displayed after getting an answer right, but it would be so helpful if they were available immediately. Thank you again for an amazing tool.
- cmmike 10y agoThanks for the feedback! 1) Cantonese flag is on my to-do list. 2) Agreed, I just need to come up with a good/automatic way of doing so without including the cloze word.