The word, in a sentence that needs it
Cloze in Context
我想＿中国菜 — 吃? 做? 买? One word is missing from a real Chinese sentence and you have the English translation to go on. 2,100 sentences, 1,492 words, and every one of them is published somewhere else on this site.
- Read the sentence and its translation. One word is missing. The English tells you what the sentence means — it does not tell you which word fills the hole.
- Tap the right word out of four. All four are real words at the same HSK level and the same length, so you cannot pick by shape. Keys 1–4 work too.
- Beat the bar. A wrong answer or a timeout costs one of your 3 ❤. Four right in a row raises your multiplier (up to ×5), and answering quickly earns a speed bonus.
- Read the reveal — the clock stops here. Every answer shows the finished sentence with its pinyin, what all four options actually mean, a button to hear it, and a link to the page the sentence came from. Nothing moves on until you press Next question (or Enter), so take as long as you like.
- Clear rounds. 10 questions per round, and each round takes another half second off the clock.
One from each band, with the answer showing. Notice what the wrong options have in common with the right one — the same HSK level and the same number of characters — and notice that the English never contains the missing word's translation on its own, so you have to work out which word the sentence needs rather than match it up.
我爱我的家。
I love my family.
阿姨在厨房做饭。
Auntie is cooking in the kitchen.
他的梦想很大。
His dream is big.
A flashcard asks whether you recognise a word. That is a real skill and this site has plenty of ways to drill it — but it is not the skill that fails you in a conversation. What fails is choosing between the four words you half-know when a sentence has already committed to a shape. Filling a gap is the smallest exercise that tests that, which is why it is the drill most often named as the way past the intermediate plateau: the point where you know thousands of words and still hesitate.
Context does the teaching
Every question puts the word back where it belongs — beside the measure word it takes, after the verb it follows, inside the sentence pattern it lives in. You are not learning 杯子 = cup; you are learning that 这个杯子很漂亮 needs it.
The wrong answers are fair
All four options are real headwords at the same HSK level and the same character length, so you cannot eliminate one for being long, unfamiliar or obviously invented. If a sentence cannot be given three fair options it is left out of the game rather than padded with something easy.
Every answer has a page
The reveal translates all four options and links each one to its dictionary entry, so the word you guessed wrong is one tap from its readings, its characters and more sentences using it. Missing a question is how you find your next word.
Every sentence in this game is one the site already publishes somewhere a person can go and read it, and each question links back to that page. That is deliberate and it is the whole reason there is no question file in this project: a made-up example sentence looks exactly like a real one, and by the time it is wrong there is nothing to check it against. The 2,100 questions here are drawn from 10,884 sentences across four sections:
- Dictionary example — 1,663 questions
- Graded reader — 192 questions
- Travel phrasebook — 171 questions
- Grammar library — 74 questions
The gap always falls on a whole word, as the site's own segmenter divides the sentence — the same one behind the HSK Level Analyzer and the language statistics, so none of these pages can disagree about where a Chinese word ends. Where a dictionary example is used, the word removed is the headword that sentence was written to demonstrate.