How to make a cloze test for chengyu (and presumably anything else)

[Forrest McSweeney]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to make some cloze tests for my chengyu list and I haven't found the procedure on the internet but I cannot help but think that this can be one fairly easily, just checking what everyone else thinks. As far as I know there is no way to generate cloze tests on pleco from the example sentences they give (if I am wrong, please correct me). However, given that Pleco has done the work of providing a giant number of example sentences which can be "+ flashcarded", I would think that it would not be difficult to do this on excel. I was wondering if anyone has tried?

I envision this-- brute force a flashcard list of chengyu flashcards (already done). Then, brute force example sentences attached to those preferred chengyu (always a pain, but can do.) Export both lists onto excel into adjacent columns. The ordering of the two should already be taken care of, but if not I am confident excel's sorting power can do the required sorting.

But now here is the key part. What next? Do you use Vlookup to draw from one column to create a blank space for what's on the adjacent column? Upload the resulting blank-space sentences into Anki and study from that platform until Pleco constructs a cloze test generator (Mike, I presume this is in the works if you haven't already done it?)

Am I missing something from this process or is this how it works?

 

[mikelove]

study from that platform until Pleco constructs a cloze test generator

Yep, definitely in the works.

But while you can manually make cloze cards (and it'll manage imported Anki ones quite happily), the preferred method at the moment is to instead keep the card based on the original word; it'll either give you relevant clozes randomly, or you can manually link a card to one or more of them (including from custom examples you've created in flashcards or in a user dictionary) and it'll draw from those. Basically we're treating clozes as more of a test type (one you can alternate with / bring in a certain stage in learning / etc) than a standalone pool of cards.

So I wouldn't necessarily recommend you make a bunch of separate cloze cards based on Pleco examples now, because our take on clozes doesn't rely on separate cards and so while, as I said, they'll import from Anki quite happily and behave the same as they would in Anki, that will differ somewhat from how they behave with our native cloze feature.