You don’t need AI for this. All you need is to look up the word in a Thesaurus.
Since you also asked for opinions: I think that such a ready-made list of synonyms shouldn’t show me words I haven’t learned yet. So if the farthest I’m in the most common words collections is the 1000 most common words, then the list of synonyms shouldn’t show me a word from the 50,000 most common words. I’m not that far on my journey yet. I’d want to see only synonyms from collections up to the most advanced collection I’ve already played. If I’m not even aware of a word X yet, then it’s unnecessarily confusing to be told to enter a word that is ”not X“.
All you need is to look up the word in a Thesaurus.
Sure, but only when the language you’re learning is so popular that you can easily find a Thesaurus online. For many languages this is not the case.
If I’m not even aware of a word X yet, then it’s unnecessarily confusing to be told to enter a word that is ”not X“
That’s not what I meant, quite the opposite - if you already know some synonyms, it is a waste of time to try all of them before guessing the right one (see my example with motorcycle/motorbike/scooter). But I agree that it would be even more amazing to be able to see synonyms that already appeared as clozes before.
I disagree. Although you may not be practicing the cloze word at hand, you are reinforcing all its synonyms and connect them with the cloze word. “Neurons that fire together, wire together,” as they say. It seems you under-appreciate how learning works. Have you ever taken a “learning how to learn course”? It’s not a waste of time. But I agree with you, and with what you probably meant—if all you care about is learning the cloze word at hand, this is not the most efficient way. It gets old to have to try all synonyms you know before you finally hit the right one. If you want your practice sessions to be more efficient, you can use hints of the form “not X”, and I do that myself.
You misunderstood me.
Let’s pretend that
motorcycle is in the 500 most common words collection,
motorbike is in the 2000 most common words collection,
scooter is in the 10000 most common words collection.
Now pretend the farthest I’ve got so far is the 500 most common words collection. Your proposed synonyms button shouldn’t show any synonym for motorcycle because since I’m not even aware of any synonym yet, I’m not thinking of entering any other word than motorcycle in the first place. Same as you wouldn’t show a fifth grader some college-level maths.
Now let’s pretend I moved on to the 2000 most common words collection. The hint should show me “not motorcycle”. That’s it. In other words, your proposed button should show only motorcycle. Don’t show scooter if I’m not even aware of it yet.
Now pretend I now need to review some words from the 500 most common words collection. When I see motorcycle now, this time I should be shown “not motorbike” because now I’ve already advanced to the 2000 most common words collection. Your synonyms button should show only motorbike but not scooter.
I haven’t read through this entire thread to see if someone else has wondered the same, but is there a way to type in a page number when the “manage sentences” tab is open for a collection? Would be a nice little feature to be able to type in the page number, as sometimes I try to speed read as far as I can in a collection, but can’t do all 500 pages of a 10,000 sentences collection of course. Cheers!