In my Turkish course the words “hastalanmak” and “hasta olmak” are both configured as alternatives to each other (they both mean “to get ill”). Now when Memrise asks to translate “to get ill” during a test, both alternatives are displayed as possible answers, but only one of them is accepted as correct. I checked and double checked. There are no leading or trailing spaces or something, but the words are still not recognized as alternatives. I have the same problem with other words too.
It has happened to me too. I’ll search for that post. I haven’t got a reply to it yet
If you’re typing, the alternative will be accepted.
I’d guess that you have another entry in the database with “D pärast M’i ja L’i” as the answer…
It’s not the only one with alternatives. I have a lot of phrases with alternatives in several rows, so each can be learned separately. This is just the one that doesn’t work along with another one
The problem is that it DOES NOT accept alternatives but it should.
Alternatives are for typing tests not for multiple choice.
But why some work and some don’t?
Your screenshot showed multiple choice, so I assumed that was what you were talking about. Are you saying that you have entered alternative answers that are not accepted when typing?
If that’s the case, I can think of only a couple possibilities:
1 - Were the alts entered in the correct column? IE: Is your alternate Spanish answer in the Spanish column or the Estonian column? I’ve made that mistake before…
2 - It could be the punctuation/strict typing bug that’s giving you trouble… (see also: Strict Typing Suddenly Required and System not Recognizing Lack of Accents)
In the original post of this thread I had a problem with the multiple choice test. The problems occurs not with all alternatives (most of them work), but only with some. I think @Atikker has the same problem.
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The way I understand it, adding alternatives does not effect the multiple choice answers.
For example, you could have…
English: Are you hungry? Spanish: ¿Tienes hambre? Alternate: ¿Tienen hambre? Alternate: ¿Tiene hambre?
And then, you could also have…
English: Are you hungry? Spanish: ¿Tiene hambre? Alternate: ¿Tienes hambre? Alternate: ¿Tienen hambre?
And you could have…
English: Are you hungry? Spanish: ¿Tienen hambre? Alternate: ¿Tienes hambre? Alternate: ¿Tiene hambre?
In a typing test, all three Spanish answers will be accepted with all three English clues. However, alternate answers only apply to typing tests.
With multiple choice question, only one Spanish answer corresponds to the English entry in the database. It is as if the alternates do not exist. If you get, “Are you hungry?” as a prompt, and you see, “¿Tienes hambre?” and “¿Tiene hambre?” and “¿Tienen hambre?” as three of the possible answers, there is no way to know which of those three will be the correct answer. One will be correct, and all others will be wrong.
That Memrise works this way is not ideal, but I suspect it’s probably due to a programming limitation…
The best solution I’m aware of is to add indicators to the English clue… For example:
Are you hungry? (informal, singular) : ¿Tienes hambre?
Are you hungry? (formal, singular) : ¿Tiene hambre?
Are you hungry? (plural) : ¿Tienen hambre?
Or in the case of your Turkish example,
to get sick (2 words) : hasta olmak
to get sick (1 word) : hastalanmak
or
to get sick (adj + verb) : hasta olmak
to get sick (verb only) : hastalanmak
Depending on how you have the database set up, you might instead be able to add the information as an “always show” attribute.
Alternatives are for typed answers.
With multiple choice, alts aren’t shown, only primary answers - one of which is the primary answer for this item, and others are primary answers of other items in the course. You have to pick the one correct one.
I wonder if a course can get into trouble with this if it has the alt for one item be the primary answer for another. For example, suppose a course has these four “words”:
Word1: A (alt, C)
Word2: B
Word3: C
Word4: D
If Word1 comes up as a multiple choice, the multiple choice options may be A, B, C, D. But that C option is not the alt answer for Word1, it’s the primary answer from Word3. For Word1, A is the correct choice, only.
Hopefully memrise has an algorithm to avoid presenting answers that match one of the alts of the item being tested on, but I don’t know if it does.
There is nothing about this limitation in the Memrise Help. So, I suppose, alternatives should work for all kinds of tests. Actually, they work for tapping tests most of the time.
To stay with you example, for complete synonyms A and C I do the following:
Word1: A (alt: C)
Word2: B
Word3: C (alt: A)
Word4: D
After that, A and C never appear together as possible answers for Word1 or Word3. This really works most of the time, but for some pairs it doesn’t.
The wrong behavior is consistent, that is, it is always the same synonyms that still can appear together as answers. After some time, it can happen, that the system starts recognizing them as alternative and then they never appear together again.
I have really a lot of alternatives in my tapping-only course and most of them work as expected, but some do not. That is the problem.
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I have the same problem, wanted to post about it too, but was to lazy to do so 
Before this update the alternates just did not come up in multiple choice – I actually used alternates as a way to avoid having confusing options in multiple choice.
In my course I don’t use word = word formats, I equate a foreign word with a few (2-4) synonyms, so the sum of those synonyms means just about the same thing. Ever since this update back in the summer, all these synonym-lists containing the first word of the desired answer come up.
It is annoying, but it also makes things easy: all you have to do is to find the beginning of a word all the answers have in common, and choose the one beginning with it. (But it makes the learning process, when you just cannot avoid multiple choice, exceedingly hard for those, who don’t know this trick.)
Earlier the other answers in a multiple choice question came from either the same level, or database entries from the same time, and I preferred that one a lot. Just because two words (or word-strings in my case) look similar, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they mean the same thing. They can be a noun and a verb. They can have the same prefix. It wasn’t one of the best decisions ever, I think.
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I’m confused by that last comment, I can’t quite figure out what it’s describing.
However, I wonder if memrise used to have a feature that actively prevented wrong answers that match alts for the current item from ever showing up in a multiple choice review, and that feature has recently been broken. Can anyone confirm whether that’s what is happening?
i share @cos’ confusion. I never had alts and _alts (visible and invisible alternatives), or synonyms from my separate columns for synonyms, appearing amongs choices…
And that’s why I never took the effort to try to explain at the first place 
The main point is, memrise DID have a feature that prevented answers matching alternative answers from coming up in multiple choice – that’s why I used it a lot.
In the summer there was an update in the algorithm, and starting then the multiple choice alternatives were chosen by their “similarity”. Similarity however is based only on the beginning of words.
And if your beginning is for example a prefix, you might end up with something like this:
And as alternatives are not even avoided anymore (with synonyms or near-synonyms I used to give them as alternative answers both in the source and the target language fields, so both were accepted as answers and the confusing definitions (once again, not single words but a few word which give a better “feeling” for the meaning) don’t come up in multiple choice.
Now I have this setup:
And this is an actual test instead:
An to illustrate my other point:
You can see here that whatever is the answer, it starts with "elő’.
You see that the prompt in Swedish is a noun, it has an article. No. 2. is an adjective, No. 4 is a verb, so they are out of the question. No. 1 and No 3. are nouns, but the first one does not start with the part all the answers have in common, the part the algorithm chose to confuse the learner with, so it must be No.3.
So that’s my point. In a way it is a lot more difficult, just because you have very similar looking words and maybe even synonyms showing up, and alternatives which won’t be accepted – but it is a lot easier too, if you notice the pattern. (But on the other side, this is the only way to answer the eventual multiple choice questions for the records where synonyms come up.)
Before the overhaul this summer multiple choice alternatives used to be drawn from a pool of words: the words added to the database around the same time and the words on the same level. Not anymore, it is based on this similarity-concept now.