For the past almost two years, I’ve been working on this course in Hebrew, my first language:
Although I’ve slowed down on adding new material this year (something I hope to make more time for eventually), one thing I’ve continued to do is take the course, which I began shortly after I first started creating it. Originally I saw it as just a form of basic proofreading, to force me to pay enough attention to each item that I’d spot errors, and also as a way of following the progression of the course to get a better feel for whether it makes sense. But over time, another really useful side effect emerged.
Often, there are several really common ways of saying the same thing in English, or multiple translations for the same word. I’ve tried to be really good about this in my course, both by using an “other meanings” column to separate synonyms that are spelled the same, and by being generous with alts. But unsurprisingly, I missed a lot when I first added words or phrases!
Because I’m fluent in the language, when I encounter a word or phrase for review after a long time, I’m not remembering what I learned it means from my own course. I just know what it means, and I type in what seems like the right way to say it in English. Sometimes, the course marks me wrong, and that’s how I know I missed an alt.
For example, today I was reviewing and got “יֵשׁ כָּאן הַרבֵּה אֲנָשִׁים” In my course, this is taught to the learner as “there are many people here”, but when I saw it today, I just typed “there are lots of people here”, because that’s a perfectly normal and natural way to say that in English. Oops, I got a yellow! So I edited the course with that in mind, and added several new alts it made me think of.
New learners of a language on memrise will often be taking several different courses in the same language. Or they’ll have had a class long ago, or have a phrasebook. When your course and some other course present the same word or phrase, but each course gives it a different wording in English - or vice versa - people get tripped up. Instead of just learning the words or phrases, they also have to start memorizing which course wants which meaning.
As a fluent speaker taking your own course, you simulate the experience of people taking your course who are also learning the same vocabulary from other sources, and you too can be tripped up by the same problem. So you’ll fix a lot more of it, and make your course better for everyone.