Thanks for all the input and feedback! A quick update on this: we are currently re-generating the audio for the Russian from English Fast Track with what we think are better voices. It should finish within the next few hours - curious to hear if you have any feedback! Assuming that all goes well and they are indeed noticeably better, we’ll work on replacing the TTS for the rest of the Russian sentences.
@alanf_us thanks for listing out your system, that’s helpful to know and does indeed sound laborious and time-consuming. It may still take us a couple weeks, but we’re working on a number of improvements to make all that work way faster / obsolete.
@mike just throwing out a suggestion, a mass email to all the cloze users to check sentences in their native language? To see if they make sense/provide audio if possible? It may help to have a bunch of verified people that sincerely want to help. I wouldn’t mind helping with English, I just don’t know how.
For example, if you gave certain users “access” to input audio, or even set up a ‘contributor’ leader board.
I’m looking at what we can collaborate on with what we DO know and can help with. I have the time and will to help, I just suck with technology LOL, if there’s a list of sentences and a “record” button, I can help for example.
My thought process is:
send out mass “we’d like your input” email, requesting their native language or skilled languages
Provide an avenue to help (Russian native speakers help with Russian, English with English, etc.)
Edit: I was fumbling around with the English audio (Spanish learning English); the English honestly sounds good for being computer generated.
I’m still willing to help to develop Cloze listening or whatever
@cazort great! We’ll work on updating the rest of the Russian audio over the next few weeks.
@datsunking1 thanks for offering to help! We’re still working on building out our moderator UI and getting everything set up. We’ll likely send out an email asking if anyone might be interested in helping out sometime soon.
Nothing whatsoever to do with Russian or Italian etc, just appreciation of all Mike’s responses and general communication. We who have crossed over from Duo are not used to this luxury, it is impressive to say the least and makes one feel more than “just a number”. Nice!
Can you let us know when you’ve updated the russian course as a whole? I’d like to get back into russian but I’m not in a hurry, so I’m willing to wait for it.
I completely agree! Tons of mistakes in pronouncing the stress in the word. I’d like to add that the pronunciation in the Fast Track is better than in the grammar section and in the ‘common words’ section. So if you can use the voices in the fast track also for the grammar and common words section, the improvement would already be significant. I also would like to add to mike@clozemaster.com that in the Russian the stress is of the utmost importance. A word pronounced with the wrong stress could have a completely different meaning, or be just incomprehensible for a Russian speaker. I also would like to add that if the stress problem is improved this certainly, and by far, would the VERY BEST online Russian course on the net. It really is a great instrument for language learning. But at the same time, the stress issue needs to be resolved. One last remark: also the google translate voice is far, far better in terms of the right stress, than the voice used in the grammar and ‘common words’ section. Please keep up the good work!! Best, Sjeng
One last remark. I regularly flagged wrongly pronounced sentences - but without specifically mentioning which word was wrongly stressed. It was too much. But if you say that it would be helpful, then I can do also that for a few days.
