I won’t lie, I get paralyzed by the choice every time I hit the Play button. Normal or Listening? Text or MC?
There’s two reasons I find this so troubling.
The first is, while I’ve read a lot about cloze deletion, I don’t know anything at all about cloze listening, so I don’t know what the relative strengths and weaknesses are. Is there any research (or even just well-founded speculation) as to the merits and approaches for listening like this?
The second reason is: all 4 of these modes apply against my same word list. I’m worried that if I make the wrong choice, I’m “wasting” reps of that word. For example, I like MC when I want to blast through a bunch of words and just broaden my list, but I like Text because I feel it forces me to slow down and think harder. If a particular word comes up in MC only – just by coincidence over multiple days – then I’ll never get that special text time with it.
And so I’m paralyzed… Any thoughts on this matter?
Hi! Thanks for posting and sorry for the slow reply! Thanks for the feedback as well, this is really helpful to know.
Cloze listening - great question. The goal of course is that cloze listening will force more active listening - you’ll attempt to recognize the words and understand the sentence before you see it - and the idea is that active listening is more beneficial for improving your listening skills than passive listening. We have a blog post that discusses active listening here. I’d be interested to hear what you think as well as if you have any further questions.
I think you’re right on track using the different play modes depending on the skill you’d like to strengthen at a given moment. By chance you might only see a given word playing multiple choice like you mentioned, but given the thousands of sentences available on Clozemaster for most languages, you’re likely to see that word again while playing text input at some point, perhaps in a different sentence. Additionally, if you’re a Pro user, you can favorite that sentence and then for example you might play your favorites just using text input. Some users also play new sentences using multiple choice, but then do all their reviews using text input.
While the analysis paralysis / decision overload is a definitely a concern we’re working to mitigate, we also want to enable as much freedom as possible to focus on the skills you’re working to improve at any given moment and for you to have maximum control over your learning. Hope this helps - happy to discuss any other questions or feedback you might have. Thanks again!
As you were talking about Cloze listening - one thing I’d love would be that the text to speech you’re using for it would also be implemented in the Cloze Reading section.
