cmmike

SEEKING FREELANCER | US | remote only

Senior Full Stack Engineer, web and mobile

Clozemaster is looking for a Senior Full Stack Engineer to help build, maintain, and improve our web and mobile apps to help people learn foreign languages faster and more effectively. https://www.clozemaster.com

Skills and experience: Rails, React, Postgres, React Native

We're a small team, fully remote. Must have strong Rails and React Native skills. Must be comfortable working independently with a focus on delivering effective solutions.

Experience with Clozemaster and/or Duolingo preferred. If you want to help people learn foreign languages, we want to work with you.

10-20 hours per week.

If interested, please send your resume, the languages you've learned and/or you're currently learning, the first thing you'd want to improve with Clozemaster, and/or anything else you think would be helpful in determining whether you’d be a good fit to work@clozemaster.com.

Hello HN! My name's Mike. I built The Great Translation Game to help me improve my Spanish writing skills. I figured the best way to improve my writing (and vocab and grammar) was by mimicking native-level content. I was copying and translating back and forth using news articles and books in Spanish, and realized the whole process could be way more efficient, and that's how TG2 was born. I wanted to share it with you all here - curious to get your feedback and hear what you think! Hope you find it as useful as I do. Thanks for checking it out!

Clozemaster might be a useful complement to the Duolingo course - lots of content for Esperanto as well as a bunch of other languages. https://www.clozemaster.com

Awesome - glad to hear!

Clozemaster already offers this for over 100 language pairings via the Fluency Fast Track feature, https://www.clozemaster.com.

Clozemaster's a game to learn and practice a language in context. The objective is to fill in the missing word in a given sentence for thousands of sentences. The missing word is the most difficult word in the sentence according to a frequency list for the language, and the Fluency Fast Track feature allows you to play a sentence for each unique missing word in order of difficulty like you described.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Thanks for the feedback! always_good's response is really on point. Clozemaster isn't intended to be better than Duolingo, rather it's meant to be a complement and another tool to add to your language learning toolbox. Speaking is also beyond the scope of Clozemaster at the moment. I'd totally recommend Clozemaster to help get more exposure, expand your vocab, and improve your comprehension, but for speaking - something like italki is probably your best option. Regarding learning sentence by sentence vs. getting a "full picture" - I would like to try to expand Clozemaster to include short texts at some point with a missing word per sentence. Hopefully down the line!

Nice!

Glad to hear! Yep I'm definitely considering a one-time lifetime payment for Pro, just trying to decide how best to price it - looking to make it available within the next few months.

Hm is there no progress showing up on your Dashboard?

Hm sorry about that - what mode are you playing? Have you tried playing the Fast Track?

Most of the lists come from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists with some additional processing to try to remove names, places, etc. I still need to make the exact lists Clozemaster is using available on the site somehow.

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.

I'm using lists with declined nouns and conjugated verbs, so you should see the more common declensions/conjugations earlier.

Yep that's a known issue - I'd like to eventually implement voice gender to match missing word gender, but it's still a bit down the road.

Thanks for the feedback! Adding some kind of testing / assessment of a user's level in a given language is on my to-do list. That said, users can also self-assess and choose the corresponding frequency grouping they'd like to practice for most languages (and I'm working on adding support for the rest). For example, I've been studying French for a while so I like to play the 20,000 Most Common Words grouping.

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.

Thanks for the feedback! Agreed on both points. I'm aiming to revamp the landing page within the next few months, definitely needs some work.

Yep! There are by-default reviews included with each round. Pro users can change the number of reviews per round as well as manually set sentences to 'Mastered', or ignore them so they're out of your queue entirely. I'm also working to get a 'Set all sentences with this missing word to Mastered' added for Pro users within the next few weeks.

There could certainly be multiple answers that make sense like you mentioned, though at the moment only one answer is accepted by default. There is however the option to add your own alternative answers, http://imgur.com/a/Vl5o4, and I'd definitely like to come up with some way to support multiple default answers in the future.

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!