I’ve been making my way through Coralie’s Intermediate French course for quite some time now. I’ve learned a lot, and it is definitely a good course that had had a lot of time put into it when it was created.
That said, there are of course things about it that do drive me a bit crazy, such as the occasional odd pronunciation, lack of context in definitions (probably my biggest complaint), and the occasional inadmissibility of the definite article just to name a few.
I’m hoping to wrap this course up in the coming months, but I know there is an Advanced course by Coralie as well. And yet there are also official Memrise French courses, I now see. Can anyone comment on the quality between these two and if there is a significant reason to abandon Coralie and join up with the others?
the course used to have a forum but some hasty “leader” merged/closed something and now I cannot find it anymore??? (my two cents: memrise “official” courses don’t even reach intermediate, usually…)
The Coralie courses have outstanding crowd-sourced mems. If you are willing to take the time to scroll through the mems for each new word, thinking through the explanations and reading the usage examples aloud, then definitely follow the Coralie course.
The official Memrise courses also have annoyances. I think they will eventually be great, but there hasn’t been enough time for the courses to be populated with high quality mems.
Remember that you can “ignore” items. This is appropriate when you understand and remember an item quite well, but you keep getting it marked wrong over something like the definite article.
@lordofpi what’s your problems with the French course of Coralie? I already tried to eliminate some franglish sounds, but there might be some left. Please answer with @tinjo, because the forums are a little hard to follow, even for a course creator or moderator.
Hi @Tinjo, thanks for responding! I wish I had kept better notes along the way, but I’ll be sure to notify you from now on when things seem like they are out of whack.
Also, sometimes I’ve found the that the given definitions of certain words are simply too non-specific or generalized, making it difficult for the learner to distinguish them from other words with similar meanings (i.e., that usually have a nearly-identical definition); other times, the definition is too specific, focusing on a narrow interpretation of a word’s meaning without including other more common meanings it might have. I’m not sure if this is within the purview of your care-taking powers, but I’ll be happy to pass these suggestions on to you if you’re interested.
Thanks for your hard work on these courses. It is good to know someone is looking after them.
Hi @lordofpi the definitions you complain about, also are quit a pain in the ass for me. You might want to not that i’m neither French, nor English native speaker, so I also every now and again exercise those words (however it’s been a while now) and when I remark some difficulties in words, also I sometimes let it be (it’s quite a job for me too to lookup the exact translation and looking up from wich course this word comes). To me the terminology should prescribe the exact meaning of the word in the original language, while also being short enough (speed review). The problem is, there are simply a s**tload of synonimes in French and English and they all mean exactly or almost the same. That’s why at one point I started adding (not …) in this course, wich I later removed after communication with my co-contributor @cos (longtime contributor). The system right now is to add the synonime in an additional column, so when you type, the wrong word, it wil tell you it’s wrong, without calling it wrong, so you can retype the right one. In this way you exercise all the synonimes. However, and this is where Memrise fails: when two synonimes are showed by multiple choice, only the right one is called “right” and the synonime is called wrong.
On top of that, I try to make all articles of nouns indefinite, however those might be uncommon (like un eau) so you will immediately learn the sex of the word (that is one of my difficulties now, however I speak French fairly good)
So you’re welcome with your remarks (before the change of the forums, we had plenty of threads with remarks in the course itself) and we (cos and I) will see what we can do about it, however, we won’t make it our fulltime job ;).
Greetings Tinjo
Thanks @Tinjo. I totally see what you’re saying, and you are right – it is partly a limitation of Memrise itself… There are, I think, one or two words where I felt the definition kind of steered me in the wrong direction after spending time with a French dictionary. I will update you in the correct course forum for anything that may come up like that, per @sircemloud.
This may be off-topic, so I apologize, but I am curious what you all do with reviews in this course. They just pile up like crazy. When I actually paid attention to them, I never learned any new words. I now just ignore them most of the time, though I know this isn’t the best way to go about things either.
