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 [email protected].
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
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.
- 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! 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!
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.
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.
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.
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 [email protected].