Points for Cloze-Listening

Clozemaster Questions, Suggestions, Feedback
#1

Hello Cloze Masters! We recently put up an experimental feature to help improve listening skills - Cloze-Listening (not to be confused with Clozemaster Radio or playing the listening skills option :slightly_smiling_face: we really want to figure out the best way to get better at listening), for Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Welsh. We’ve since added accent buttons, added a way to ignore sentences, and fixed some other minor bugs. Thanks for all your feedback so far!

We’re now considering what’s next for this feature, and hoping to get some more of your input. Here are a few of our thoughts/questions/ideas at the moment:

  • Adding points - we’re thinking 20 points per correct answer. Cloze-Listening is difficult, and it’s text input.
  • Updating Cloze-Listening to count towards your streak and daily goal streak.
  • Adding a separate leaderboard for Cloze-Listening based on listening time.

Any thoughts on the above or anything else you think we should add/change? We’ve also received some feedback about the quality of the sentences/recordings (notably here and here), and while we’ll certainly aim to improve cloze word selection and get rid of low quality sentences, we quite like the challenge of the low quality recordings when they come up. There’s an “ah ha” moment when we see the text and can then somehow understand what’s being said.

All that said if you think this feature is a complete waste of time we want to hear that too. :slight_smile:

Thanks for all your help to improve Clozemaster as always!

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#2

Ciao @Mike. This is quite a challenge! Tried it today and felt pretty defeated, then suddenly got a couple right and felt fantastic! Points for (miraculously) correct answers added to general score would be great but making a separate leaderboard would put me off, far too much pressure, but then I’m not much of a leaguist anyway. Really like this feature, frustrating but fun, I hope it stays. Thanks for yet another ottimo Cloze option;-)

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#3

@Mike I am liking the enhancements so far. Thank you!

I would definitely like to see all three of your current ideas for next steps added. It would help integrate it into my overall practice.

As for future enhancements, I’ve often wondered if there could ever be a way to seamlessly integrate sentences that I choose in Clozemaster with your other application, The Great Translation Game. Using Cloze-Listening sentences would be very helpful.

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#4

Just tried it for Welsh and Spanish, and… nothing. Blank white space between the usual page head and foot. That’s in the web version - in the app, it’s not showing the option at all. :woman_shrugging: so… no utter humiliation for me :grin:

Later: it worked on an updated ipad (web version only). Yes. It’s incredibly hard :crying_cat_face:

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#5

:thinking: thanks for letting us know! What browser were you using?

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#6

Safari thru iOS on data

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#7

I personally use listening while driving, so I can repeat the sentence over and over. Points for repetition would work better for me, that way I can stay hands free/safe :smiley: It would be nice if it counted towards review as well. I have a hefty pile of reviews LOL

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#8

Edit: Just tried the new Listening option again. Managed nearly three correct out of twelve. Soon realised that it’s the pretty complicated content of the sentences that discombobulates me more than the missing word. I’m not used to talking about governmental pergorative disruptions, but by heck, I’ll keep trying and I’m loving the different voices. Finché c’è vita c’è speranza!

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#9

Why not in English language?

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#10

Si, sono d’accordo. Perhaps it will come to English if enough of us think it’s a good Cloze addition. A dopo…

Edit: I think I may be forgiven for not quite getting this first time round :wink:

“Un esemplare in dispersione è stato avvistato addirittura in Irlanda”.

A dispersed specimen has even been spotted in Ireland.

Umm!

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#11

I definitely like that you’ve added Cloze-Listening, so firstly thank you very much for that :slight_smile:

Now with regards to your questions

I don’t know if it would be possible to implement in any way, but could you perhaps try to take into account minor typos in provided answers? Currently it’s just “correct”/“incorrect”, and, especially since it contains a lot of words I’ve never encountered before, it’s quite disheartening if you did actually manage to understand the word correctly, but you didn’t realise for example that it should’ve been a double consonant instead of singular (in Italian I still struggle with this a lot, in some cases I completely get it, but in some cases I really don’t understand why they have the letter twice), or have missed out an accent.

E.g. if you’re deciding to go for 20 points per correct answer (which definitely seems fair, especially if there’s not going to be any kind of hints (green text, box length, etc.) available), perhaps deduct 2-4 points for every typo, allowing up to a maximum of 2-3 typos per answer?

While I don’t think it’s necessary to add, I’m just curious if you are considering adding any kinds of hints (the green text, text box length).

I’ve encountered sentences where, even with the correct text shown, I still for the life of me can’t make out the word said.

I know that the whole point of Cloze-listening is to get used to variable speeds, accents, background noise, etc., but it might still be useful to add the option of slowing down the audio slightly for those super-speedy native sentences?

Finally, I’ve been wondering what the “report” button in the Cloze-listening part is for? Is it for reporting bad quality recordings? Inappropriate content in the sentences? There is nowhere to provide a report reason, which might be helpful to add?

Anyway, thanks again for all of this so far :slight_smile:

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#12

Really like this feature. There are a fair number of bogus sentences (such as those that ask you to translate someone’s name from English to English), but love the practice interpreting different voices, accents, etc.

I think it would be great to get some nominal points for getting an answer right (10?), but don’t want the pressure of a separate leaderboard. What would be REALLY helpful is to see some stats (% correct vs. % incorrect or % hard/medium/easy).

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#13

@sindaco: Regarding reporting. I have reported a few sentences so far. Mostly for really bad sound quality (not just mumbling and noise, but static preventing hearing the speech or incoherency), and also for being asked to translate a name as a name. It is not useful when learning Italian to translate, say “Max Planck” as “Max Planck” - those sentences should be removed from the available options.

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#14

@Floria7: I’ve done a bit of contribution/review to the crowd-sourced voice database for English - and there are a LOT of heavy accents on offer there. Some very clear, many really hard to make out even for native English speakers. I guess that’s sort of the point, but I think many new learners could find it really frustrating.

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#15

It’s purely optional, a little extra suitable for those more advanced. ClozeM isn’t really an app suited to new learners so they’d no doubt find it difficult. The more you listen, the easier it gets. I love it, hope it becomes a permanent fixture.

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#16

Me too! Strangely addictive too…

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#17

I wouldn’t mind a full on dictation exercise option. Since the whole recording has already been transcribed, it seems a waste to only have to identify a single word. It’d be a great way for people to train their ear and their grammar simultaneously and is why people love Yabla Scribe so much. Might have to address a lot of the grammatical errors in the transcriptions first though.

As for the recordings themselves, whilst I know it’s not really Clozemasters “thing” to curate every single entry, some of these are truly awful and are really of no benefit to anyones learning time. I’m not talking about choppy recordings or obscure vocabulary thrown at you out of context, that’s all excellent and super helpful for training my ear, what I mean are the recordings that have clearly had no effort put into them and might as well have been delivered by a 1990’s text-to-speech program. We gain a lot of clarity and context through speech inflection and these lazy, monotone user submissions are of absolutely no benefit to anyone.

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#18

Welcome! An interesting read. There certainly are one or two strange recordings but I quite like the challenge of tuning into them and eventually “getting” them.

You make some good points.

Auguri…

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#19

@mike, please do add points for completing a sentence correctly in Cloze-Listening. (I also like @sindaco’s idea of giving partial credit for slightly misspelled correct words.) As for what the number of points should be, 20 sounds fine to me, since it really is a difficult activity, but even adding 2 would let me track the number of sentences I’ve done from day to day, which is the most important thing. At the moment, when it comes to keeping track, I’m completely on my own.

The context: I’ve been playing with regular Clozemaster (text input; typing color hint; changing text box size) for four years. Yesterday I reached a milestone where two measurements (points and level for my main language pair) reached a nice round number, and a third measurement (length of streak) was also fairly round. Also, conveniently enough, my review queue (which I’ve been emptying every day) has started to drop off, which is what I’ve wanted to happen. This gives me a good opportunity to reevaluate things. I took two online tests that confirmed but quantified what I already knew: my skills in Russian are way out of balance with each other. In particular, my knowledge of the written language (for which much of the credit goes to regular Clozemaster) is far ahead of my ability to understand or produce the spoken language, despite everything I’ve done outside Clozemaster to work on those (though if I hadn’t put in that effort, those skills would be even further behind).

I realize that I have the option with regular Clozemaster to use audio and turn off the translation. I tried a round of that. It’s okay, and I may try more, but the problem is that sentences that I play this way will end up in the same review queue as the sentences I’ve played without audio in the past. So now I’ll be playing with audio, but when I encounter my old sentences, their repetition intervals will be calibrated for my playing them without audio. I might be able to mitigate this somewhat by using different collections for playing with audio from the ones I used for playing without, but I’m not sure how that will work out. It would mean, at a minimum, having to pay attention during review to which sentences come from which collections, and that seems like it might be more effort than I’d like. Also, the audio for playing this way is text-to-speech, and I much prefer listening to real voices (which provide better practice and fewer annoying vocal “tics”).

So I vote for making Clozemaster-Listening a “first-class citizen” feature of the site, which means that people who play it should be rewarded with points per correct word. Two and a half years after it was introduced, I think its time has come – at least for me!

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#20

I am checking my numbers of daily played sentences in “full history” located under “favorites” on the main page. When you open “full history” it gives you a “daily stats” table with the first stat :“played”. Unless you talking about some other way of “keeping track” I thought this might be useful.

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