I have discovered how good the “Speaking” skill game is.
I had long avoided this because the voice recognition seemed like it would be unreliable. In fact, it is unreliable. But a bit of frustration–when, for example, the recognition simply can’t hear the difference between “prendre” and “rendre”–is a small price to pay for an extremely effective drill.
First, there are words which I memorized by spelling but never tried to pronounce. My pronunciation of them was untested, and, as it turned out, sometimes incorrect. Words that you cannot pronounce correctly are not words that you can use in conversation. In fact they are landmines.
Second, and relatedly, the voice recognition forces you to make those difficult consonant and vowel sounds in your target language again and again. In my case, it is the French “r.” If I don’t make a convincing “r” sound, I don’t get points. (You can see the wrong words the AI thinks you are saying as you say them.)
Third, to correctly prompt the voice recognition, you have to say the whole sentence, or at least the part up to the cloze. When I just type in answers rather than speaking them, I often don’t even bother to read the whole sentence. Reading the whole sentence gives you bonus vocabulary and grammar for free.
Fourth, the standard typing game puts a lot weight on spelling skill. If you leave out a silent “e,” you get the question wrong. In my view, spelling ultimately isn’t so important, because these days we always have autocorrect or spellcheckers. Of course I would love to have immaculate French spelling, but the language is an orthographic nightmare, and I care much more about learning to speak with good pronunciation.
Fifth, you can speak answers faster than you can type them. Even with frustrating repetitions to get the speech recognition to hear what I am saying, I can still burn through more questions than I can with typing. My preference is to play Clozemaster fast and run up my score.