Is there anyone who is using cloze deletions with Skritter who can comment on their effectiveness? I know Byzanti was using them at one point.

For those who are not familiar with the term, a cloze deletion is like a fill-in-the-blank question. For example, if you are studying the character 咖, a cloze deletion might be 我很喜欢喝_啡.

This does double duty: firstly as an example sentence showing the character's usage, and secondly as extra context to help you figure out which character Skritter is looking for.

I am experimenting with them using the custom definitions feature and have already run into the problem that the underscore _ means "italics" to Skritter. For that reason I've been using ~ in my own cloze deletion sentences.

James

You can use _ , just put a space either side of it and it's fine. It's what I do.

And as for their effectiveness: absolutely brilliant. They're effective though, as I am already familiar with the sentences and don't have to think through it (when I learn a new verb, conj, and sometimes adj or noun I learn a sentence to go with it which I stick in anki). It's very fast, helps me recall the word, and also the structure it's used in sentences.

If you've not seen it, this site has a bunch of cloze deletion exercises from the Chinese Made Easy (轻松学汉语） series of textbooks, all free to use, with some other learning exercises: http://www.quia.com/shared/search?category=9&adv_search=true

@Doug thanks, I'll give those a try at some point.

My main interest is with using cloze deletions to make learning new characters and words easier. As it is, I usually have to do a fairly large number of repetitions when I first see a new character or word, unless it's a fairly obvious combination of chunks I already know. For a while I thought this was simply the price that had to be paid to learn new things. Then I ran an experiment (with Russian, but I don't see why it would be different with Chinese) which convinced me that learning new things would be much easier if I had example sentences to go along with each new item. So now I'm going through my review list and adding example sentences, particularly for things that have been giving me trouble.

For example, take 新闻. I have several words that I'm studying that mean something like "news" so this one always causes me some trouble. So I went to nciku and found 新闻记者, which I added to the custom definition for 新闻 in the form "~记者=reporter" (where ~ stands for the character or word in question).

James

I've been using the Byzanti technique for a week and a half and am happy to report that it's very helpful. It requires a little bit of time; when I run across a troublesome word, I look it up in the dictionaries and find an example sentence, which I convert into a cloze. This takes a little while, especially because I'm studying both simplified and traditional and have to do everything twice, but it pays off in the long run.


I seem to recall that there was some prospect of Skritter integrating with Tatoeba; if so that would be awesome and would save a whole lot of time.

I see three main benefits.

-- If you are studying two or more words that have similar definitions, you can use the example sentences to figure out which one you're being asked for.
-- If you close your eyes and repeat the example sentence from memory a couple of times, you are learning how the word is used in context and maybe you can even start to use it in conversation.
-- You're getting extra exposure to the other words in the example sentence, which helps strengthen those memories.

James

Glad you've found it helps!

The other thing I wouldn't dismiss is using pictures, especially for nouns. It also helps recall/solidify memories. Quite quickly done - I drag a picture out of baidu image search, rename, and then into my ftp program.

So for verbs/adj/adv I use cloze deletion, and for nouns, pictures.

Also, it's fun to look at pictures...

Exciting news on the example sentence front may be coming soon...

@Byzanti I haven't yet gone heavily into using images; I'll give it a try and see if it helps.

@Byzanti not sure why you mentioned ftp and rename. What I've been doing just now is going to Google Image Search, finding a relevant/memorable image, copying its URL and pasting that into the 'mnemonic' field using the img: prefix. That seems slightly simpler, no?

True, but this way I can be sure the link wont go dead, and can back them up. I'd recommend baidu image search though, firstly it's in Chinese (so you get to see exactly what the Chinese consider the thing you're searching for is), and the thumbnail images will be smaller than google images, which are a little larger in its current incarnation...

Oh, I had the impression that Skritter was actually copying the images over and resizing them, I didn't realize it was linking back to the remote host. Hmmmm, that makes it more of a pain.

Hmmm, now I'm not seeing my custom definitions all of a sudden. For example, when I practice 指標, the custom definition should be

target; norm; index; indicator
指令~=mandatory target

This has been working fine for a while. However, about ten minutes ago I saw the prompt with the standard definition (i.e. without my custom definition). Clicking on the hourglass shows that the custom definition is there all right.

I thought it might be a caching problem, so I refreshed, but when the character came up again it still didn't display the custom definition.

James

Yeah, there's a bug. Sometimes mnemonics disappear after being added (although occasionally can select it again through the 'other mnemonics menu'), occasionally custom definitions disappear, occasionally the state of a mnemonic (shared or unshared) isn't saved (so occasionally people see unintentionally see some of my really bad mnemonics). The first two usually happen with newly added stuff.

There might be two bugs here though, as in your example its sort of saved (in the hourglass), whereas sometimes it's nowhere at all...

Glad someone else has noticed it!

I'll add another bug for that one. 哎哟!

I've fixed what might have been the bugs causing this, although I'm not sure. Please let me know if you see another this one happening again.