Cloze deletion and leeches

[Shelley]

This maybe slightly off topic but as it has been mentioned in this topic, I thought I would ask.

 

What are/is leeches?

 

What are Cloze/Cloze'd sentences.

 

Sorry if these are newbie questions but I am new to SRS study and its associated things.

 

Thank you

[imron]

A [...] sentence is one where you have a space and you need to guess the missing word.

cloze

 

Leeches are cards that you continually and consistently get wrong.

[imron]

This maybe slightly off topic

Split off from discussion here.  The great thing about the forums, is that starting new topics is free

[Shelley]

I take your point but as the people who used these terms were in the other topic I figured they would know the answers.

 

Thanks for your help

[Shelley]

Thank you imron for clearing that up.

 

If you are continually and consistently getting it wrong why would you want to remove it from your study list?

 

Wouldn't it be better for these cards to be flagged up at the end of study sessions so you can go away and concentrate on them.

 

Sorry if this has been said before.

[Lu]

If you continually and constitently get them wrong in SRS, then clearly for these particular words SRS is not working to help them stick, so you need to find some other way to get them in your head more firmly (and then put them back in your SRS list). Too many leeches makes SRS such a chore that you'll grow an aversion to doing it at all, which is bad for retention of all the other words you have in there. But to my knowledge, throwing the leeches off your list is usually optional.

And please don't feel a need to apologise for asking questions!

[character]

If you are continually and consistently getting it wrong why would you want to remove it from your study list?

I wonder if it might work better for some people to show them the answer card for a leech early in a session and then later show the card with normal behavior.

[Shelley]

@ character That sounds like a good plan.

 

I think I am getting the idea behind SRS now. Have also encountered it with my summer of skritter and can now see what is meant about leeches.

 

@ lu, thanks, wasn't so much apolodizing for asking questions as for asking questions that may have already been asked many times before.

 

I see what you mean, if it is not working in SRS you need to something different. This is why I think a list of leeches, say once a week or something, so you can see that you need to do some extra work on them.

[imron]

I wonder if it might work better for some people to show them the answer card for a leech early in a session and then later show the card with normal behavior.

That would throw off the SRS algorithm though.  I think purposeful and mindful study is probably going to be more useful (in terms of long-term learning outcomes).

[Lu]

If I come across words I have trouble remembering I mark them wrong for a few days, even when I get them right, just to see them some more times. It often works quite well. I do have a few words that I get right four times, five times, even more, until I inevitably get them wrong again. In a way those are worse.

[hedwards]

Shelley, you leave out the leeches because if they're not sticking there's usually other words to be learning. Leaches are, in my experience, usually words that you're not coming across in context enough to really stick.

 

It's also a really convenient listing of words that you're going to need to apply some sort of mnemonic system on. A lot of words will stick relatively easy, but there will be words that require more work. Additionally, having words clumping up that you're struggling with tends to cause frustration and negativity along with drastically increasing the difficulty of the current day's review.

 

I think that most SRS programs have some method of filtering for just the leaches. That way you can find example sentences and such if you don't already have them.

[Shelley]

@Lu that sounds like a good plan. If unsure mark it as wrong, I tend to do this already but didn't put it together with leeches.

 

I agree the ones you get right for several times and then get wrong are the worst.

 

There are cloze sentence exercises in NPCR and other text books I have had, but they were always called "fill in the blanks"

 

Its always nice to know that there is a more "grownup" word for things like this

[tysond]

I find leeches are often a word I thought I would need, but actually rarely come across.  There is always another word you could be learning instead, so it makes sense to get rid of leeches in favor of better words.   A good example for me was 猕猴桃 (kiwi fruit) which I thought I would learn early on as a part of a sentence about fruit salad but turns out it is rarely said (although I heard it for the first time in the wild this week).  The characters are not that common either (at least at lower levels).  The pain I went through to learn it could have got me 3 other words!

 

However, if a word is "must learn" but may not be coming up in my reading/TV watching/whatever then what I do is introduce more cards that use the word - more sentences with this word clozed (or even unclozed), to be sure I get more familiarity with the word.  

[michaelS]

Kiwi fruit - I only ever see it written as 奇异, e.g. on menus at the fruit smoothie/ Hong Kong milk tea stalls that are everywhere and extremely welcome in summer

 

Those characters are much more useful, besides

[Zeppa]

The original Cloze exercises omitted, for example, every fifth word. Whatever the student put in the gap might work or might be grammatically wrong. At least, that's how they work in English. Nowadays the term Cloze is often used for exercises where a particular word has been left out, for instance a particular noun or verb.

[character]

That would throw off the SRS algorithm though.

I don't think it would be a problem; it's the equivalent of looking up the word outside of the flashcard program before your flashcard session. Showing the answer doesn't change anything if the user still doesn't recognize the card when it is shown later. It might give the card a one-time boost by the user recognizing the card this session, but the card is still subject to the rules of the algorithm. One could argue it's a variation of retesting missed cards at the end of a session.

[imron]

It's more the opposite of a test at the end of a session.

Showing the answer for the leech card will potentially lead to getting the answer correct even though you would otherwise get it incorrect, meaning you'll have cards scheduled further past their forgetting index.

For a review of incorrect cards, you have already failed the card and therefore shortened the review time. A second review at the end of the session will improve your memory of it meaning that the review will (theoretically) be scheduled earlier than necessary.

So in one case you have cards scheduled further than ideal and the other you have cards scheduled earlier than ideal.

Personally I'd prefer the latter because I think for long term learning, a pessimistic approximation of whether you know a card is better than an optimistic one.