Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Russian (all from English) have a new feature in beta on the web we’re calling Cloze-Listening (not to be confused with playing the listening skill, which we’ve referred to as cloze-listening in the past naming things is difficult ).
Cloze-Listening lets you hear a sentence recorded by a native speaker, and then attempt to fill in a missing word from the sentence. It works similar to the playing the listening skill, the major difference is that Cloze-Listening uses audio recorded by native speakers.
There are different accents, background noise, variable quality - in other words it’s an excellent challenge to improve your listening skills. If you can understand and master these sentences, you should have no problem in the real world.
We’re trying it out as a separate feature (separate from collections, points, leaderboards, etc.), and each language pairing has just 1,000 sentences for now, though we should be able to add significantly more. It also uses Easy/Normal/Hard controls for spaced-repetition.
Excited to get your feedback!
What do you think of the format (hearing the sentence, then having to fill in the missing word, then seeing the translation, then selecting Easy/Normal/Hard or ignoring)?
What would you like to see added/changed/improved?
Do you find this feature useful and would you like to see more sentences added?
Anything else please let us know of course as well. Thanks for trying it out and thanks for any feedback!
Wow! Great challenge! Not there yet. I am trying to make all my collections finished . The >50,000 most common looks like another lifetime away. I will definitely use this feature from time to time because it is a real life Italian language. Training your ear to all the variations will become the part of this journey. Thank you for giving this choice!
It might be an idea to give the details of your O/S and Firefox version. I don’t have any issues with Windows 10.0.18363 64 bit, Firefox 82.0.3 (64 bit).
With regard to the feature itself, I like it, and thank you for it… though I would like it MORE if it also had the typing colour hint as we have in the standard game. I hate getting something wrong because of a typing and/or misppalling (sic) error.
My Windows and Firefox versions are the same as above and Chrome is 86.0.4240.198. Everything claims to be up to date.
I was able to get the first sentence to play in Firefox after I restarted my computer. I just hit return to advance to the second sentence and it showed the error message, then played the audio for the first sentence while showing the text of the second sentence. After that I could only get the error message. I was playing French from English.
I don’t understand the logic in giving no points or sentences played credit for this, but letting people play the same simple sentences in other collections day after day for 32 points.
@kadrian@punk French should now be fixed! Thanks for letting us know. There was an issue with the permissions for some of the audio files that should now be resolved. Any additional issues please be sure to let us know.
Thanks for the input! That should be doable.
We’re not yet sure how this will fit into the bigger picture of Clozemaster, so didn’t want to go mixing it in with the existing points/stats, but we’re pretty excited about the native speaker audio and wanted to make it available as soon as possible.
I tried to bin this reply because I noticed that some other replies that slipped in ahead of mine covered the points that I raised. However when I hit the bin icon I get a 500 internal server error.
French still isn’t working for me with either Firefox or Chrome. Out of several attempts, I’ve managed to get one sentence to play a few times, but mostly it’s just showing the error message.
Ciao Kadrian. Brilliant! There are certainly some beauties in Italian that leave me open-mouthed - I still learn them tho, they sound beautiful in Italian, and you never know when they might be needed;-) Lol.
This has a lot of potential to be a valuable tool for listening to the target language spoken in all of its variations. From my limited testing of it in Spanish, there were two issues that stopped me from using it for a longer period (which I really wanted to do). One was the quality of the audio. I struggled to understand many sentences just because of the quality of the audio. I don’t want to hear professional recordings. That would defeat the purpose. However, many of them came close to being incomprehensible. The second issue was that I had too many sentences where the missing word was a name. This was frustrating because in a live conversation, you often ask the person how to spell their name if it is not particularly common. Those type of sentences felt like wasted practice. Aside from those two issues, I am very excited about this new feature and the enhancements to it that will most likely be coming soon.
Thanks for the feedback @dac573! This is super helpful.
We should definitely be able to avoid names, thanks for letting us know.
As far as sentence quality - currently there are only 1k sentences for each of the language pairings where it’s available so far, but we should be able to add many thousands more. The best option at the moment is to ignore any sentences with poor quality, we’ll then aim to set something up where if a sentence has been ignored by enough users, it’s removed from the pool for everyone.
Any other feedback please be sure to let us know. Thanks again!
One option we’re leaning towards is having this feature be separate - no points, and with its own leaderboard(s) to track the “unique time played” stat and/or simply number of sentences completed. We could also alternatively add the % Mastered and points just like playing regular collections, but this feature seems more difficult than the regular collections, and it might be interesting to have a separate leaderboard (though we may be able to have that either way). Curious to hear if anyone has any thoughts/preferences.
Personally I would prefer longer/customisable intervals. I realise that they will increase with time, but especially while the request below hasn’t been implemented, I keep getting confronted with 50+ reviews to plough through, before I can even listen to any new sentences, and that is after having selected “easy” twice. I’ve just started ignoring everything in the interim if I got it correct twice in a row and understand the whole sentence which I’d prefer not to do, but it’s the only workable way I see at the moment, because I normally like to listen to 30-40 new sentences each day (I set out to listen to only 20 or so, but then occasionally just end up going with the flow of the infinite rounds).
Please as a minimal added feature would it be possible to just separate out the reviews from playing new sentences? One button for “play” and one button for “review”, would be so much appreciated. Then I could decide to review perhaps 10 and play 10, or whichever combination I feel like, rather than having to ignore sentences for fear of the day a couple weeks down the line where I’ll have to work my way through 200+ sentence reviews, before being able to listen to any new ones.
I guess in general I’m really just loving Cloze Listening too much So anyway most of all just thank you for offering this amazing feature in the first place, and perhaps I’ll just need to work on curbing my enthusiasm for it
Hi! Since this feature has been in “beta” for a few years now, are there any plans to expand it to other languages?
Clozemaster was great for getting to B2 level in Norwegian, but I found native level listening in the real world quite challenging. Im starting German at a much lower level, but can see that Cloze-listening would be really useful eventually, and would love to try it in Norwegian.
In general it would be awesome if there was a table on the Forum for availability or planned release of all these new features for each language-dyad (e.g. the lofi Youtube videos, Spotify playlists, new Fast Track, etc.)
I too would love to see Cloze-Listening extended to other languages as well. It could be even useful for advanced learners of English to practice understanding some of the more obscure accents.
(not to be confused with playing the listening skill, which we’ve referred to as cloze-listening in the past 
naming things is difficult 
).
which I’d prefer not to do, but it’s the only workable way I see at the moment, because I normally like to listen to 30-40 new sentences each day (I set out to listen to only 20 or so, but then occasionally just end up going with the flow of the infinite rounds).
So anyway most of all just thank you for offering this amazing feature in the first place, and perhaps I’ll just need to work on curbing my enthusiasm for it 