Chinese flashcard

How Clozing works in Mandarin Mosaic.

In Mandarin Mosaic, clozed deletion tests form a large part of your learning.

A cloze test is where a word in a sentence is deleted and you try to guess the word which fills in the blank.

To answer a cloze test in Mandarin Mosaic, tap on the blanked out word and type your answer in Chinese characters. Currently, only answering using Chinese characters is supported, so you will need to have a Chinese keyboard installed on your device.

Mandarin Mosaic was designed to make creating your own cloze flashcards simple.

When you add a sentence to a pack in Mandarin Mosaic, you can click "Add cloze" to choose which word to cloze.

After choosing which Chinese word to cloze, this word will be blanked out during a lesson. You will need to type in the exact word to get the cloze flashcard correct.

chinese vocabulary

Automatic clozing and word clozability

If you don't pick a word to cloze when creating a flashcard, then the clozed word will be chosen automatically during a lesson.

When choosing which word to cloze, Mandarin Mosaic takes into account a concept called Word Clozability.

Word clozability is defined as: "Given that a user knows a certain word, how often on average do users get that word correct when it is clozed in a sentence that they haven't seen before?"

Using this measure, it becomes clear that some words are better for clozing than others. For example, if a word has many synonyms then it is usually not a good word for clozing. Conversely, words that have few synonyms often have a high clozability score.

Mandarin Mosaic will prefer to cloze unknown words or words which are intended for review in a word review lesson, but if those words have a low clozability score, then occasionally a different word in the sentence will be chosen for clozing.