About polycloze

polycloze is a self-hosted language learning website. It is completely free and open source. The source code is available on GitHub, under the AGPLv3 license.

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Problem

Reading is a good way to acquire vocabulary, because it exposes readers to words in different contexts. However, it becomes a chore when you have to look up every other word in the dictionary. This happens when your vocabulary is not big enough.

Our goal is to help you learn words efficiently, so you can start reading stuff in your target language as quickly as possible.

Strategy

  1. Prioritize useful words. By learning the most common words first, you can quickly increase the percentage of familiar words in any text.

  2. Use spaced repetition. Spaced repetition exploits the spacing effect to minimize the rate of forgetting. The less you forget, the less time you spend relearning forgotten words.

  3. Study sentences instead of words. A word can mean different things in different contexts. Knowing a word is more than simply knowing its definition or its translation. You need to understand how and when to use the word.

Features

Adaptive word scheduler

The word scheduler introduces the most common words first by default (strategy #1). But for more advanced learners, it wouldn't be a good use of time to start from the lowest difficulty. Instead, the word scheduler should adapt to the learner's level.

When the word scheduler notices that you already know the words at a certain frequency class, it will start introducing words at a more difficult frequency class. But if the new words are too difficult, the scheduler will bring the difficulty back down.

Auto-tuning spacing algorithm

When the spacing between reviews is too short, you end up reviewing words more than necessary. And when it's too long, there's a chance you'll forget the word before the next scheduled review. The algorithm tunes itself so that the spacing between reviews is just right. There's no need to tweak the parameters of the spacing algorithm.

Cloze deletion tests

Cloze tests ask you to fill in missing parts of a sentence or text. This is perfect for strategy #3, because it tests how well you can understand the context and identify the missing word.

Digraphs

Even if your keyboard doesn't have all the needed keys, you can use digraphs to enter symbols in your target language. For example, \a: gets turned into รค.

Credits

Sentences and translations were taken from Tatoeba. These are released under CC BY 2.0 FR.