掲示板 Forums - Vocabulary: Fill in the blank

Thanks for the suggestion! While I'd absolutely love to do this, it's extremely difficult to program something like this. I've thought about it a lot over the years, but it would have to go through two possible paths:

1. Select the sentence, and fix the specific words that can be swapped around (so that there's no chance for ambiguous word orders coming up)

2. Allow an open system where it blanks out an entire sentence or piece of a sentence, and the user must look at the English translation and complete the sentence.

Both systems require an over-reliance on the English translations, which put a lot of our foreign users out in the cold (while many of the languages have extensive vocabulary data in their native language, the sentence translations are a tiny fraction of that).

The first option is similar to the grammar questions, and while it may not seem the case, it takes a *lot* of work to choose and validate each sentence. There is no "this Japanese word is represented by this word/words in the sentence" data, so that would need to be generated as well. When working with prechosen values for a sentence, the reusability value of the sentence plummets, since it's hard to create variations on the question, so users will more quickly remember the question, and may not be proving that they actually know the concept when it comes up again.

The second option is tricky because it opens up a HUGE amount of ambiguity in sentence ordering, which is pretty flexible in Japanese. renshuu's ordering system has gotten pretty good over the years (so it can catch a lot of "this is acceptable, but a different order" situations), but it's far from perfect. So while option #2 would be relatively easy to implement, the quality would be low.

If I have the data and the ability to do it in the future, I definitely will. As sole developer for renshuu, though, my time is pretty limited, so I have to try and find improvements and features that have more "reusability" in them. It's one of the main reasons I haven't yet done long-form listening/reading practice: it takes a ton of time to generate and validate that data, and then a 2-3 paragraph dialog can become "stale" after just a few uses by a learner :(

Thanks for the feedback - I definitely see where you are coming from, and this is undoubtedly a space that I'd like a solution for, if one can be done.

#2 (entire sentence translation) is unfortunately a non-starter for the reasons given above - I do not want to add something that (anything sentence based for vocab goes into renshuu pro) would be a "hey, this is a useful tool, hope you speak English!" for our non-English speakers.

#1 - It feels "ok", but I agree with you - it doesn't seem like its ideal.

Ultimately, if you're dealing with a single spot in the sentence, you open yourself up to ambiguity unless you're relying on the translation. For example, 彼は＿＿帽子があります。 - Let's say the original sentence had 赤い in it. I could think of 20 words (easily) that could fit in there and work (without looking at the translation). Makes the false-positive situation too common :(.

But let me say that I would absolutely love to come up with a solution to this - if I seem to be overly dismissive on the suggestions, it's just because I've been thinking about this feature for *years*, trying to figure out a way to resolve it.