Dear Memrise,
Last time, I have problems with the commas in memrise.
It always was like: if you type a comma, you can answer the word for the comma OR after the comma!
Last time, it isn’t any more like that, can you fix that?
Please help, now there are problems with old courses!
Greatings, a huge user,
Lukas
You may wish to read this long thread - it is explained:
It may be that creators or curators will have to take some remedial action.
Memrise already knows about this, and they do not consider it a bug.
In fact, they deliberately changed the way that commas work, without warning us, about a month ago.
That change caused many courses to be broken. This is discussed at length in the long thread that DW7 just posted, or you can read a short summary here:
To be honest, I am one of the people who are very glad that this was changed. Because I really vastly prefer courses with whole sentences to those that are just list of words (the difference in learning quality is enormous), and if you have sentences, well, you’ll have commas in them. And you don’t want the part after the first comma to be optional. The same effect that was previously achieved with commas as separators can still be achieved by inputting those words as alternative answers. The effect of having a full grammatically correct sentence cannot be replaced by anything else. Sure, many courses with sentences used to skip punctuation due to the effect that commas had - but, trust me, that was bad. Many languages have rules that you have to put a comma before a certain word or construction - and if you keep practicing on sentences that have no commas at all, you won’t learn that rule. So - no valid alternative. Hence, this option is the best and I hope they don’t change it back.
However, all that said, I strongly agree that users should have been warned about the change - preferably in advance, so the course creators would have had the time to make changes to their courses. So, Memrise admins, if you’re reading this - please do so next time you make a change in the system. It will make everyone’s lives easier!
I understand your point of view, and I share it with regard to preferring “strict typing” courses myself. I can’t understand why anyone would want to learn and reinforce incorrect typing of foreign words. All of those diacritical marks are there for a reason, and should be learned.
But having said that, Memrise could have improved their system, and added courses that require strict punctuation for sentences, the way you like, without damaging all of the existing courses that were using commas as answer separators.
I mentioned this already in one of those long threads about the comma change, but to summarize it again, they could have easily added a column to the course database with a TRUE/FALSE value, defaulting to FALSE, called IsSentence. Then, people who wanted to create courses that require correctly punctuated sentences as answers would have checked the IsSentence box on those items, and everyone would have been happy. Cos had also proposed something similar; adding a TRUE/FALSE value for strict punctuation to the database.
Either one of those options would have allowed everything to function properly, without the course creators having to modify hundreds of courses, containing tens of thousands of items.
There is no excuse for the mess that they made and the poor way that they handled it.
I agree completely, such an option didn’t cross my mind, and it would be quite valid.
to be honest, your argument has very little to do with the comma as separator - this is the main point. I am one of the people who are very upset that this was changed - I found myself sitting on a bunch of broken courses, some of them I’ve been learning for months… Basically, Memrise found a way to stop people learning via web
How does it have little do do if sentences with commas were essentially broken, since typing just the first part of the sentence would count as the whole thing? I agree the problem you’re facing now is bigger, I simply don’t think they’re unrelated.
p.s. I learn only via web as well, barring rare occasions when I don’t have access to the computer, and I think the web is and should be a superior version, at least with the app as it is.
I still want that Memrise change this,
am I the only one?
I’d like Memrise to change it back to the way it was. Still, I think they can have it both ways like what @xvg11 has said.
I’d throw in the suggestion that they should allow course creators to use whatever separator they want to use and then the site would just check that on a per course basis.