This page provides a collection of premade Anki decks filled with cloze deletion tests for learning a second language. Use the table below to find the dataset for the language you speak (the native language), and the language you wish to learn (the target language).
| Native Language | Target Language | Anki Package | Audio | CSV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | French | eng_fra.apkg | eng_fra.zip | eng_fra.csv |
| English | German | eng_deu.apkg | eng_deu.zip | eng_deu.csv |
| English | Spanish | eng_spa.apkg | eng_spa.zip | eng_spa.csv |
| English | Italian | eng_ita.apkg | eng_ita.zip | eng_ita.csv |
Frequently Asked Questions
How to Import these Decks into Anki
You can import the cloze deletions into Anki using the CSV file provided
for each language. To import a file, click the File menu and then select
Import.
Due to file size, audio recordings of each sentence are provided as
a separate download. You can import the audio by copying the files into
Anki’s collection.media folder. See the Anki
manual for
more information.
What is a Cloze Deletion?
A cloze test (also cloze deletion test) is an exercise, test, or assessment consisting of a portion of text with certain words removed (cloze text), where the participant is asked to replace the missing words. Cloze tests require the ability to understand context and vocabulary in order to identify the correct words or type of words that belong in the deleted passages of a text. This exercise is commonly administered for the assessment of native and second language learning and instruction.
For example, here is a cloze test from the previously linked Wikipedia article.
Today, I went to the ________ and bought some milk and eggs. I knew it was going to rain, but I forgot to take my ________, and ended up getting wet on the way.
The interesting thing about cloze tests is that they force you to understand both vocabulary and the context where it is used. In the previous example, the first blank is preceded by the word the, and therefore must be followed by a noun, adjective, or adverb. However, a conjunction follows the blank; the sentence would not be grammatically correct if anything other than a noun were in the blank. Correctly completing the test forces the learner to understand both vocabulary and grammatical rules of vocabulary usage. This makes cloze tests ideal for learning and testing a second language.
What is Anki?
Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it’s a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.
— Anki SRS
Anki is a powerful and intelligent flashcards program with full support for cloze deletions. Anki will make sure that you can remember and recall the answers to cloze deletions.
How Were the Cloze Deletions Created?
Raw sentences were gathered from Tatoeba, which provides a collection of user generated sentences and translations in many languages. Next, I grabbed a list of the 50,000 most frequently used words in a language, according to data from OpenSubtitles. This list was used to choose which word to use for the cloze test. I followed the same method as clozemaster for choosing the cloze for a sentence.
The cloze deletion to test, or the blank in the sentence, is the least common word in the sentence within the [5]0,000 … most common words in the language. In other words, for a given sentence all the words in the sentence are checked against the top [5]0,000 words in a fequency list for that language. The least common word is then used as the cloze test. In this way the vocab learned … is the most difficult of the most common.
Audio samples were created using Amazon Polly.