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ClozeCards: New Stories, Flashcards and Motivation

I just heard from David, the creator of ClozeCards.com (which you may remember from a previous post). He recently shared the information below with me, and I thought it would be really great to let everyone else know about these new features. The site itself has gone through a redesign, so I highly recommend going to check it out if you haven’t been over there yet, or have yet to see the new changes.

Anyway, I’ll let David go over some of the new additions–perhaps the most exciting of which is the recent collaboration with a Chinese publishing company to bring Chinese short stories into ClozeCards!

Short-stories, flashcards, and motivation.

Using flashcards is probably the most efficient way to learn Chinese. Unfortunately, flashcards offer very little to mark your progress and has no obvious milestones that can be celebrated. I don’t know about you, but for me, learning Chinese becomes much more fun when I see myself improving, when I can do something I previously couldn’t, and when I achieve a goal.

Now, after a long time of searching, I think I’ve found the best of both words: The efficiency of flashcards together with the motivational boost of small, achievable goals. The generous people at Chinese Stories Publishing have given me 11 short-stories, complete with audio and English translations, and I’ve created corresponding flashcard decks and graded the stories by difficulty. These stories are perfect goals: They’re reasonably short (you can learn the vocabulary in less than a week), you can easily how much work you need to put into them, and they’re fun!

I’ve prepared a GIF to show you how the flashcards integrate with the stories. What you see here is me practicing the vocabulary for the story ‘The Hundredth Customer’. The Chinese title is 第一百個客人 (dì yī bǎi gè kè rén). As I fill in the gap sentences with pinyin, each occurrence of the word turns green in the story. Once I’ve reviewed the words a couple of times, they’ll loose their color to make them easier to read.

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What’s more, to help understand the text, there’s both an English translation for each paragraph and a pop-up dictionary for each Chinese word.

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The difficulty level of the stories range from beginner to advanced and the full list can be found here: https://clozecards.com/content/?tags=Audio+Book

Have fun,
David from ClozeCards.com

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