Idea: making practice sessions more challenging for intermediate+ learners: random AI generated sentences during practice

[elmar]

Hi there!

I’m really enjoying using Readlang. I mainly use it to read my e-books. I like that practice sessions combine different skills, like typing and choosing a word, and always include a sentence for context.

As an intermediate German student working towards an advanced level, I’d like to see a bit more difficulty to really get comfortable with the new words I learn along the way. After reviewing always the words in the same sentences, I end up “memorizing” the sentence rather than practice the word in context.

I have an idea for making practice more challenging. Let me know what you think or if you come up with other ideas for adding a bit more difficulty for intermediate students.

Add AI-generated alternative sentences containing the word

So, apart from getting the sentence containing the word we added to “study”, offer sometimes an alternative sentence generated by AI. These sentences could be just generated on the spot for the review session and don’t need to be stored anywhere, the more variety the better

Here there is an example of me asking AI to generate 5 sentences containing the root word in any form (plural, singular, case, etc.):

These could be some sentences that come up during review practice so that I am faced with different sentences and have to exercise my a bit more.

Another alternative would be asking for words derived from the root lemma. This is way harder and maybe more problematic. I’d be happy with just root word option – or even just the exact same word .

Something like this should be optional as it adds difficulty and, in the case of German you’d be practicing grammar too, having to choose the given case for a word, etc.

Anyway, it’s just an idea, let me know what you think or if you can come up with another idea to make reviewing more organic and challenging. Thanks!

[Steve]

Love the idea! Although to fit with the way that Readlang currently works it would be easiest to restrict it to practicing the same exact form (conjugation) of the word, since Readlang’s spaced repetition algorithm treats each different word form as a separate item that you need to learn.

(There are pros and cons of this approach, but it’s conceptually simple and works decently well across all languages)

[Nikolay_Khrustalev]

Besides different forms of same word, there could be different meaning depending on the context. I can’t figure out if those different meanings are treated as separate words when learning via flashcards? Because it looks like I am only given one, the first example of a sentence in context.

[Steve]

They actually aren’t treated as different words when learning with the flashcards, which could be considered a failing. What you can do is add multiple translations to cover the different possible meanings of a word in all the contexts you’ve encountered it, and if this is done, then I think the system works pretty well.