partire can have a nuanced meaning of to start (this one surprised me). “Vorrei partire con calma per poterci conoscere meglio.”
relazione can mean report. “Poteva almeno leggere la mia relazione.”
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Finito! I’m very grateful to Robert for making this course, and for letting me catch little errors and clean things up as I work through it. Now I just get to review and review and review…
As far as those two words go, those observations square with my sources so I’ve updated them.
I also want everyone’s opinion on two issues I was considering. I sometimes find scanning the hints a little bit difficult, especially if there are many of them. Would it make things easier if they were organized in some way, maybe alphabetized? If so, I will probably clean up the ones that are tripping me up.
And the other point worth discussing is whether, when a word has a close cognate in English, it is beneficial to list the cognate as the first definition. The issue is that sometimes a definition will fit that convention and sometimes it won’t, so I find myself making disorganized guesses from time to time.
For example, the definition for “immaginare” is “figure, envision, imagine.” Might it be better with “imagine” leading the charge?
Of just run a search on “appear” in the database and compare the definitions for all the words that come up. Sometimes the cognate leads, sometimes it doesn’t. In many cases it’s hard to anchor my memory by coming up with a reason why the definitions are ordered in the way they are.
I’ve got the course finished and it works great, but if other users think that this change would be an improvement, and it meets with Robert’s approval, I’ll start cleaning up definitions as they come up based on this principle.
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I agree with you that something should be done with the “not such-and-such” hints. I think that the alphabetisation of them would be a good start, but to clean it up even more, why not separate them from the actual definition and put them in their own “Similar Words” attribute, as can be seen within djupton9’s 5,000-word Spanish and Portuguese courses and vlarya’s 5,000-word Norwegian courses?
As for your second point, although it would be beneficial to a learner to present the cognate meaning first, it might not always be that the cognate meaning is the best translation. For an example, consider “l’apparizione”, one of the words that comes up upon searching for “appear”. All three of my sources (collinsdictionary, wordreference and linguee) list “appearance” before “apparition” in their definitions, as it appears in this course. Even though “apparition” is clearly the cognate, the word’s meaning as “appearance” likely has more frequent use. In short, I just think that we should be careful before assigning a cognate meaning to be the primary one for a given word.
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I checked out those other courses and think that the look of the similar words attribute is pretty nice. That might be enough visual organization to make things easier. Layering some sort of logical organization on the list of similar words could then be icing on the cake.
And on the second point, I agree that a simple rule of “cognate first” isn’t the right one, but if you look at the example of “immaginare,” that is a pretty clear cut case where “imagine” does lead off the list in all the sources you mentioned. I’m not sure why it’s tucked in the end of the definition, and how the ordering decision relates to other similar words. I think there are other cases with the same issue.
Maybe the definitions just need to be standardized in order with respect to their definitions. That will probably take care of every cognate case that strikes me as a little off, but is obviously more work to apply.
(edit: typo)
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Congrats on finishing the course, @gmelillo!
(I’ll post some thoughts about what you two are discussing a bit later. I’m just trying to finish the review session and dash off my computer.)
versare - add pay to the definition. “Mi devi ricordare di versare il primo pagamento alla ragazza nuova.”
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Congrats. Your speed is awesome.
Thx for that.
I’m really grateful for your thoughts. I agree that it’s sometimes way too convoluted. A third “similar words column” is a nice idea. But I’m not sure if Memrise allows you to display both the “part of speech” as well as a envisioned “similar words” row simultaneously. That’s a technical issue we need to check out before adapting any changes. Does anyone know a course where such columns work simultaneously? And another thought on this: having the answer in a separate column makes some audio tests very hard to answer, because afaik there is no way to display an answer hint whatsoever in a separate column. So it’s hard to differentiate some words.
This would be my approach to this whole issue.
1: make sure the English translation is accurate and suitable. The bucket list at the start of this thread explains what I mean and what must be done (in a nutshell: up to three suitable translations, focus on the 2nd part of the course) Let’s wait (weeks!) for more users to learn this course. Suggestions on translations keep pouring in. Good translations are the basis for all other steps.
2. Find words that have exactly the same English translation entirely. Make sure to include also two-words-entries where the first two words are interchanged (maybe even three words where all words are the same but sorted differently). This must be done in Excel. I guess that’s less than 200 words or so. Try to improve their translations to clarify subtle differences in meaning. If this ain’t possible (My guess: it’s always possible) make sure the answer hint is given in the brackets (or in the column about to be introduced if that displays the right way).
3. Virtually all other easy to mix up entries don’t need an answer hint. There’s an unambiguous answer. That’s where I went way to far and where things got messy. However in this case we could move the answer hint (which is more like a similar word list) to a proposed additional column, which afaik is at least always displayed when learning the words the first time (or when you made a mistake) - maybe you have to click on the little plus sign to display this column (still OK).
4. Pronouns give rise to massive confusion. Am I right? I’m still unsure what to do here…
It does. Of the courses I mentioned above, the Spanish and Portuguese ones have simultaneous columns for part-of-speech, word-frequency number and similar words, while the Norwegian courses just have those for part-of-speech and similar words. These attributes appear both when learning a word and reviewing a word, either with a multiple choice or typing test. I don’t remember for certain if they appear for listening tests.
Additionally, and although this is just wild speculation, it is something that I have thought since starting this course, moving all of the similar words outside of the definition might actually help to diversify the potential answers of multiple choice and listening tests. Of all of the courses I have learned with on Memrise, this has been the only one where, for example, a multiple choice test has been made up of 4-8 synonym definitions. I think it might be that one of Memrise’s algorithms focuses on these since the desired word, that is, the actual focus of the given test, also appears within other definitions as one of the similar words.
It might be that I’m far off-base with this one, but it’s just my line of thinking.
I had written a program to do just this a while back for the Norwegian courses. It reads in the Excel sheet and returns a document with similar words for each entry based on all of the given definitions. I know I still have the code around somewhere, so I’ll try to find it. Of course, if the task can be accomplished faster in Excel, then, by all means, go for it!
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This is great. I basically agree with Robert’s program. The first goal is to get unambiguous definitions wherever possible. That really is the foundation.
Everybody has their own little preferences for how to do this, and it’s not that big a deal, but when I’m working my own definitions I use punctuation to differentiate meanings. I took an example of a definition that I cleaned up just to show you the format. Check out “spedizione,” it looks like this:
the (act of) sending, forwarding; shipment; expedition
Semi-colons block of different (reasonably) distinct meanings (this is sometimes a judgment call), and commas separate words that are used to narrow down each meaning. When I build Anki decks I like to format like this:
the (act of) sending, forwarding;
shipment;
expedition
I’m not suggesting we radically change the formatting, just illustrating how I think about this. And also setting up the following question: is it possible in Memrise to put line breaks in definitions? I like having the visual organization clear because it makes it easier for me to process the cards at a glance, and I’m thinking of importing some of my own work from Anki, just to contribute some courses to the site.
EDIT:
One other thing, Robert, on point (4), I actually find the conjunctions much more difficult than the pronouns. Some of the pronoun definitions are still a little too long for my tastes, but if I look at the definition, and then the list of excluded words, I can usually straight deduce the result. But with words like:
affinché
poiché
purché
sennò
quindi
perciò
etc.
I am pretty miserable. I haven’t looked very carefully at how to differentiate them better for myself (that might become apparent as my reviewing makes clear which words are trouble for me), but having run the whole course I would say that conjunctions deserve a hard look before pronouns.
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Can we discuss “affacciare?” In the sources I use, I have the non-reflexive form being rare (I checked the “nuovo vocabolario” and it does indeed list the verb in its non-reflexive form). The definition currently reads:
“to show, advance, venture, raise”
From looking at linguee.com and wordreference.com I think we can tighten that up.
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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/affacciare
Has it as “to show, advance, venture, raise”
http://en.bab.la/dictionary/italian-english/affacciare
“to lean out” “affacciare la testa” “to show one’s head” What are you thinking?
Can we add launch to lanciare. Seems the most common definition.
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Add fix or set or secure to fissare; “Dovremo fissare a mia moglie un appuntamento col dottore.”
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This is a good idea. I’ll keep your suggestions in mind when editing entries. Going back and repairing all existing entries is a daunting task. This is really a long-long -long term task, I’m afraid, I even removed some of the semicolons I sometimes found in dictioanary entries, because I either didn’t understand their importance or thought that having both commas and semicolons leads to confusion. However thx for your input.
I’ll keep that in mind. I din’t have an easy solution though. Need to contemplate about that. One possible solution. Instead of adding the negative hint [not xxx, yyyy, zzzz] give the initial letter as a hint [won’t work with most pronouns though].
to fix, fasten, secure; gaze, stare, look fixedly; arrange, set
thx (@gmelillo your format w/semicilons)
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added that. Don’t know whether intransitive or transitive meanings are more frequent. I very mucht trust in the Dizionari of the Corriere della Serra. The dizionario mentions both forms w/o making any comments on frequency. C.f. http://dizionari.corriere.it/dizionario_italiano/A/affacciare.shtml
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Somenone already added that. Thanks for that.
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I tried. I googled. I did research, Doesn’t seem to be possible. As much as I love memrise, sometimes it’s just weird.
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Last level is a test level for this purpose only. I played around with it. It’s not quite working. Try it yourself. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. It tried both: a regular column and a attribute column.
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Having two attribute columns simultaneously won’t work in the android app. In android it always shows the “similar words” attribute only but never the “part of speech” column. That’s stupid. In the web version it works quiet well, but won’t help you in audio tests (attributes are not displayed when taking audio tests). However, I assume that most people learn mobile.
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Adding a regular column won’t work either. In audio tests, hints don’t appear at all [which seems to be a memrise weakness we can’t do anything about]. In other tests (both web and android app) I can’t make the similar words hints appear before the answer, which is pretty pointless.
Plz play around with the test level. I can’t make it work. However, this is the last step: first I’ll focus on adding better translations for the last 3000 words…
The only thing I can think of that might help is to check the “Show at Tests” option for the new attribute (found by clicking the blue pencil icon in the header row). This is the how the simultaneous attributes are set up for the Norwegian courses I keep talking about. Of course, if you have already tried this, then I find myself out of ideas.
Huh. I was approaching the problem from the opposite assumption. Unfortunately, I don’t even have access to the app (I have a Windows phone), so even though I might be able to theorise possible solutions to any problems, I’m not going to be able to help test them outside of the web version. For this reason, I did not activate the “Show at Tests” feature that I suggested above; I’ll leave it up to you since you will also have to test whether or not it has any effect.
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