Thanks. However, I don’t see the figures updated in either the “Played” or the “Listening Skill” column when I play Cloze-Listening.
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I’ve just enjoyed 20 “Listening to real voices” and really wish some encouraging points could be awarded. I know, they’re only points but they all add up. Really enjoyed hearing them again!
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Thank you all for all the great feedback as well as bringing this conversation back to life recently.
We’ve spun the Cloze-Listening feature off into a new app called ListenUp. It’s currently available for French and Spanish on Android and iOS. I think the current release already covers many of the points above:
- It offers 5 game modes - flashcards, multiple choice fill-in-the-blank, text input fill-in-the-blank, word scramble, and transcribe.
- Points are awarded for each sentence.
- There’s a first draft hands-free mode (will likely add points and reviews in an upcoming release).
- The audio has been curated for quality, and sentences curated to avoid especially uncommon vocabulary, partial sentences, and too many proper nouns.
- There’s a “half speed” button for playing the audio.
- Each word is highlighted as the audio plays after answering to help with word differentiation.
- New words are introduced before playing each sentence.
The entire focus of the app is to improve your listening skills by listening to lots and lots of native speaker audio. Echoing @alanf_us’s points above - listening comprehension is a critical skill and text-to-speech is great but can only take you so far. At some point you just need to put in the work with native speaker audio.
Our goal with ListenUp is being able to understand native speakers as quickly and effectively as possible.
Here are the links if you’d like to try it out
We’re still not yet sure how best to proceed with Cloze-Listening. As we thought through all the possibilities of integrating points, reviews, and stats with Clozemaster, a separate app started to make the most sense, so we decided to give that a try.
Any and all feedback, thoughts, and ideas are welcome of course. Depending on your feedback we’ll decide on what features and languages to release next. Thank you again!
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Yes, I am also missing Italian (and a WIN version).
But more fundamentally I am not convinced by the separate app path.
It might make sense as a future business case (
nothing to be ashamed of) and it might be technically easier, but didactically you have to let people graduate slowly into it.
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I agree with your “separate path” thinking. All in one place would be good.
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