Show HN: Clozemaster – Learn language in context
clozemaster.com
clozemaster.com
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!
A couple notes:
"the post-Duolingo learn language in context app"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.
At first I thought I was just crazy, but this has happened at least 3 times in 3 "rounds" so far.
For example for 「何」 you'll likely seen the kana written as 「なに」 instead of 「なん」 for 「何ですか」
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.
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.
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.
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 doesn't explain certain language rules (I am learning German) and you have to brute-force until you "get a feeling" and memorize patterns.
Another problem, is that there is very little focus on developing your speaking skills which (to me at least) are the most important.
I would really love to see some emphasis on speaking skill development.
Even more, Duolingo sucks at text understanding development - you get to learn sentence by sentence, but you are never getting a "full picture". So when you get a proper, full text (some short article, for example) in another language, it just feels a bit overwhelming.
Basically, what I am trying to convey and what's missing (for me) in this kind of apps, is that learning language is not about filling in missing words in the sentences.
Btw, I really like that you charge $8 - IMO Duolingo here misses out a huge chunk of money. I would easily pay $5 and probably up to $10 but now I have just to "endure" one ad every 5min which doesn't bother me at all.
This doesn't need to be better than Duolingo, it just needs to work a different part of the brain.
One problem with Duolingo is that its fill-in-the-blank always comes with a word bank which makes them all pretty trivial. You don't need much understanding to choose between a bank of "girl", "cloud", "yesterday", and a single verb conjugation.
Open-ended cloze tests, on the other hand, actually force me to think.
I think it's outside of Clozemaster's scope to care about speaking. Didn't Duolingo remove speaking tests from their app recently because everyone toggled them off?
>Open-ended cloze tests, on the other hand, actually force me to think. In this regard, the Duolingo web-app fares much better, because all the answers you have to type in. After you get used to that, using mobile app feels like cheating :).
>Didn't Duolingo remove speaking tests from their app recently because everyone toggled them off? They are still there. Web app has even a version of that on steroids - they give you a sentence in English and you have to vocally translate it.
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.
(Right?)
As you can see, the materials I have used ( Clozemaster and Assimil ) are not too grammar heavy. :-)
Not that it hurts, though.
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.
It doesn't seem, however, to be sufficiently flexible in the various ways to fill in the blank (at least in Russian). For example, when given the sentence
Как вы на это ___
"Он предложил это. Как вы на это смотрели?" could be literally translated as "He proposed that. How did you see (or look at) that?", but the correct translation would be "He proposed that. What did you think about that?".
Source: am a native speaker.
[EDIT: I'm curious, if there is by-default reviews, is there some way to shut off the reviews for sentences I got right on the first try? There are so many sentences that I don't imagine I'd get much benefit doubling back. That being said, I'm not sure there _are_ reviews, I just saw that review projections are in the pro thing, I think?]
Do you also detect word types? I.e. "Der Mann" (nominative masculine article der) vs. "Das Haus der Frau" (genitive feminine article der) [German] or "að leita að" (infinitive marker að vs. prepositional að) [Icelandic]
At the moment Pro users can play sentences grouped by missing word part-of-speech for German, Spanish, French, and Italian from English. I've tried a few different approaches to determining the word types / part-of-speech of words in a given sentence, but none have been super accurate so far. There's definitely a lot more fun/interesting stuff I'd like to do with Clozemaster if I ever do find or develop a good way to detect types.
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.
After just one run and 3 minutes into the registration it already is asking for money? I have no problem paying when I see what I'm paying for. Here I had too little time to see, and already am annoyed by this. So cloze-listening is already unreachable for me, and I would not play the other game without having any language knowledge. Fail right here.
Learning a language is a task for months, you'll (the author) be very safe asking for money after several days or even weeks of trial.
The core features are free, then there are some advanced features you can pay for. I'm trying make as much free as possible, at the same time I'm bootstrapping everything and need some way to support the site. The cloze-listening is a trial that resets daily.
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!
- 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.
"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.
Love this app, love the simplicity of the user interface.
Do you know of a way to quickly save words to a file?
(I ask because I'm brushing up on my chinese and have noticed I've forgotten some words.)
Thanks. (^-^)
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.
Watch YouTube videos in whatever language you're learning and fill in missing words. No connection to it...Just discovered it a few weeks ago and it's super fun and addictive: you get to hear lots of new music and learn some serious comprehension.