Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

clozemaster.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–69 of 69 posts

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#61

Post by cmmike »

tiglionabbit wrote: post #59
tiglionabbit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This 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.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#62

Post by tiglionabbit »

cmmike wrote: post #61
tiglionabbit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This 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.

You'd think you could use whatever generates the voices to also generate the phonetics for the kanji.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#64

Post by carlmungz »

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 think gaining a feel for a language and memorizing patterns is more useful at the beginning of your journey. I am learning Spanish and I find it works better for me when I 'feel' something is right and then finally understand the reason why it is so.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#65

Post by C4K3 »

Hey I know this might be late, but using it there's one major pain point with specifically the Japanese, in that what you have to input seems to be cut off at kind of arbitrary points, that make it annoying to input.

For example I just got the sentence 昨日本を買った where you have to fill in 買っ, but the Japanese input doesn't work for just inputting 買っ, I have to type 買った and then hit backspace to delete the extra character. This happens a lot, probably in more than half of the sentences I'm getting, it seems like it really loves to end words on っ.

It'd be cool to change it so it splits words differently, or if that's not possible make it accept extra input that matches the following characters, so inputting 買った would be accepted as correct.

Beyond that I'm loving the site, and it seems like you got a good business model, I'm still considering whether to try out pro.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#66

Post by Nadya »

cmmike wrote: post #61
tiglionabbit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This 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.

This 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」

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#67

Post by cmmike »

laurieg wrote: post #51

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…

Thanks!

- bad sentences/mistakes - users can report sentences with errors. I'm notified and those sentences are then removed from their queue. Pro users can also ignore sentences, I'm thinking I may make this a free feature in the future as well.

- Difficulty is just by word frequency at the moment, what kind of heuristics do you have in mind?

- I'd definitely like to be able to measure the effectiveness of Clozemaster somehow, but I'm not sure what kind of hard data I could come up with. Perhaps in the future I can come up with some kind of test/experiment to compare traditional single word flashcards vs. Clozemaster, or test reading comprehension somehow after playing Clozemaster for a certain period of time.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#68

Post by cmmike »

C4K3 wrote: post #65

Hey I know this might be late, but using it there's one major pain point with specifically the Japanese, in that what you have to input seems to be cut off at kind of arbitrary points, that make it annoying to input. For example I just got the sentence 昨日本を買った where you have to fill in 買っ, but the Japanese input doesn't work for just inputting 買っ, I have to type 買った and then hit backspace to delete the extra characte…

Thanks for letting me know! I'll check it out. Japanese has been a tough one with no word boundaries.

Re: Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context

#69

Post by laurieg »

cmmike wrote: post #67
laurieg wrote: post #51

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…

Thanks! - bad sentences/mistakes - users can report sentences with errors. I'm notified and those sentences are then removed from their queue. Pro users can also ignore sentences, I'm thinking I may make this a free feature in the future as well. - Difficulty is just by word frequency at the moment, what kind of heuristics do you have in mind? - I'd definitely like to be able to measure the effectiveness of Clozemast…

I was thinking of heuristics like structural complexity of the sentence:

"The film that came out last week was good."

Every word is very simple but in combination they produce complexity that is challenging to many learners.

Post reply on HN