Understand spoken language

What are the different types of quiz question?

Submitted by admin on 28 June 2018

You can choose the type of quiz question which you are given from the Quiz tab. Each quiz type has its own special characteristics, so its good to have a full understanding of each.

Automatic quiz type

Quiz type selection

By default, the quiz type is set to Automatic. In general, this is the best quiz type to have selected, as it will select for each word or phrase the best type of quiz question depending on your current knowledge. When you don't know a word yet, it will ask you with a multi-choice question. As you get better at that word or phrase, it will then ask you from the language you are studying into your own language (e.g. French to English). Finally, when you know the word or phrase very well, it will ask you with the hardest question type of all, which is from your own language into the language you are learning (e.g. English to French).

Note that with the Automatic quiz type selected, the question type for a word or phrase will change to be easier or harder, depending on how well you have done in the past. If you get a word right, the question type will become harder, but also, if you get a word wrong, the question type will become easier. For example, if you are asked a word from your language to the language you are studying, and you get the word or phrase wrong, the next time you are asked it will start again by asking you a multi-choice question.

We strongly recommend that, at least to begin with, you leave the quiz type as Automatic.

Multi-choice quiz type

multi-choice quiz type selection

In a multi-choice quiz, you are give a selection of 5 answers to choose from. This is the easiest type of quiz, since you can just pick the one which you think is correct. Often, you may not be completely sure which is the correct answer, but you may at least know some of the answers which are not correct.

multi-choice quiz type question

Note that a multi-choice question will always try and find fairly similar answers for you to select from, at least in terms of the length of the phrase. For example:

multi-choice question with phrases

Listening skills: "French to English" style quiz type

Here, by French to English, we mean from the language you are learning, into your own language, so instead of French, this might be Thai or Dutch. This is the best quiz to practice your listening skills, since you will hear your target language spoken, and you will have to know what the person is saying.

French to English quiz type

In this question type, you will simply hear a recording of the word or phrase, and you will have to see if you understand it.

French listening question

Lingopolo does not judge automatically whether you got the answer right, or wrong; that is for you to do. When you see the answer you decide whether you were right or wrong:

I was right! vs I was wrong!

Speaking skills: "English to French" style quiz

The next style quiz is from English (or your own language) into French (or whatever your target language is, which might be Thai or Dutch).

Quiz type English to French

This is the quiz type which is designed to test your speaking ability. You will see here that you are just prompted with the English word (or phrase) and you have to know how to say it in the target language. This is exactly the skill you need when you are speaking in a language; you know what you want to say, and you have to pull from your brain the right word, or words, including the right word order, the right forms of the words, and of course the right pronunciation.

English question "chicken"

Just as with the listening-skills question (French to English), the speaking skills (English to French) asks you to be the judge of whether you got the answer correct or not:

The French for chicken is "poulet"

Although it might seem like you cannot mark yourself correct or not, in fact, this works very well. Most of the time you will know the word or phrase (in which case you were right), or have no idea (in which case you were wrong). In the case of pronunciation, you will gradually train your hearing to better and better be able to say whether you were saying the right thing or not.