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Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

clozemaster.com

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Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#51

Post by laurieg »

Awesome work! I've built similar projects like this but nothing at this scale, or this polished. I have a bunch of questions:

How do you deal with bad sentences/mistakes in the source data? Even the best dictionaries I look at often have very odd example sentences (at least in Japanese/English dictionaries). Do you have any plans to vet for things like this?

You measure word difficulty by frequency, but do you do any heuristics for sentence difficulty?

Do you have any idea if you method works? I'm not attacking you, what your site does is very similar to what I did on my own to learn a second language, but having hard data would be great.

Again, I really love the site, keep up the good work!

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#52

Post by laurieg »

tasubotadas wrote: post #29

I am a regular Duolingo learner but I have yet to see how this is better in a significant way (I am not trying to be a dick but just giving honest opinion - sorry :( ). Or maybe I just missed something. I played around with your product and I've found that I need to enter words or select missing ones like in Duolingo. It seems a bit more difficult than Duolingo though. The biggest problem to me with Duolingo that it…

> The biggest problem to me with Duolingo that it doesn't explain certain language rules (I am learning German) and you have to brute-force until you "get a feeling" and memorize patterns.

I'm not trying to be contrarian but, in my opinion that's a strong point, not a weakness.

I work with language learners a lot and many of them spend a long time looking at explanations of foreign languages in their own language. This basically never works. The people who really progress dive in and let their brain soak up the new rules and patterns. In a metaphor: reading grammar explanations is like try to learn to play the piano by reading about on how a piano works. You might learn a lot, and even work out how to play simple tunes but your fundamentally practicing the wrong thing.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#55

Post by skosch »

cmmike wrote: post #2

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 answe…

Mike, 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.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#57

Post by danneu »

Clozemaster is great and has already become part of my daily drill.

I noticed that my daily streak grows just from doing a single exercise that day.

I recommend letting us set a point threshold (maybe low | medium | high) that we must meet to include the day in our streak.

It's a lot more motivating and beneficial to maintain a streak that requires an investment of 15-30 min/day.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#58

Post by cmmike »

danneu wrote: post #57

Clozemaster is great and has already become part of my daily drill. I noticed that my daily streak grows just from doing a single exercise that day. I recommend letting us set a point threshold (maybe low | medium | high) that we must meet to include the day in our streak. It's a lot more motivating and beneficial to maintain a streak that requires an investment of 15-30 min/day.

Good point! Thanks for the feedback. I'd also like to eventually add daily goals, and perhaps have streaks for those as well.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#59

Post by tiglionabbit »

tiglionabbit wrote: post #46
cmmike wrote: post #2

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 answe…

I 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.

Huh, 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.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#60

Post by cmmike »

skosch wrote: post #55
cmmike wrote: post #2

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 answe…

Mike, 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 h…

Thanks 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.

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