OK, I can understand that that must be REALLY REALLY frustrating
I assume this is happening when you review?
Is it not possible to scroll down and read what is in the tiny lines?
I am just wondering whether this is some kind of bug rather than a problem with the course. I can honestly say that I have never seen anything like this when reviewing. At the most, a box gets cut off, but I can usually see most of what is written.
It might be an idea to remove the app from your phone and re-install it. See if that helps things?
Another question: what level have you got to?
I have put your question in âweb bugs - Androidâ, too, in case it is a bug problem rather than just the length of the entries.
I am re-learning the course, for various reasons, but one of them is to see what it looks like on a smartphone as I primarily used the web version when I first started using memrise in May 2014. I have only gotten as far as Level 37 on my second time around, so maybe the problem you are having will only crop up later.
Thanks for your input! I hope you are right, too, because it would be a pain in the bum having to shorten all the extended entries (although I AM doing so in the case of overly-detailed entries, partly for the reasons we discussed in another thread).
It happens either reviewing or learning new words. I canât scroll or do anything, just have to pick and hope My phone is about two years old, app updates itself regularly.
At long last, I realized that the entry, âatt slappaâ, in Level 27 was the result of a typo by sehiralti. First I took a look at KORP and found that âatt slĂ€ppaâ is waaaaay more frequent than âatt slappaâ. I then got out my printout of the original SweWac database and saw that it says âatt slĂ€ppaâ, not âatt slappa.â
I did do a comparison of the first 3,000 words and the printout once before, but I overlooked this one
Anyway, this morning I read something about someone having released a record and the phrase âslĂ€ppa ny skivaâ was used in the headline. When I wanted to add it to âatt slĂ€ppaâ and âen skivaâ, I discovered that there was no entry for âatt slĂ€ppaâ at all
It has now been rectified, but of course, all the mems attached to the word are wrong.
For âen mĂ„nâ the audio is âi mĂ„n av.â And for âinte förrĂ€nâ the audio is âförrĂ€n.â Very confusing when doing a review that involves only audio.
Could you pass along this request to @sehiralti, the original creator of this course?
"Hi there!
I would like to rename a column in the course, i.e. the one currently called âpronunciationâ and which hasnât been used at all - (and isnât needed, either, given that Swedish is pretty phonetic and, two, we have audio files for all the words) and rename it âsimilar wordsâ.
I have come across this in a Dutch course and it is a neat way to show a learner which word is requested from a number of similar ones. I have been adding things like: "not: âfullstĂ€ndigâ in brackets after the definition of a word, but it often takes up a lot of space and looks a bit messy when you use a smartphone.
Would you agree to this column being renamed âsimilar wordsâ in all four parts of the 8,000+ Most Common Swedish Words course?
I would be very happy if this suggestion met with your approval.
I noticed from the leaderboards that you are doing this course again and wanted to ask you how you are liking it and whether you have noticed anything that needs improving.
I printed out the original Kelly database for about half the words (around 5,000, I think) and went through the course comparing the original database to this course and I think I managed to find most of the incorrect entries. Thanks so much again for alerting me to those mistakes! Once I started looking, I found a few more, but not that many, considering the size of the original database.
Iâve gotten back to working on the frequency list, yes! Motivation tends to come in waves I guess.
I havenât noticed anything wrong with any of the entries themselves at all. I have made some more general observations.
Iâve been doing âspeed reviewâ for the first time. Itâs great for me here because a lot of the ânewâ words arenât really new for me and just need a quick strengthening. Iâve noticed that thereâs a tendency for the entries to sometimes sort of over-explain themselves. This is not a problem in classic review, but it does make speed review harder, since at some point the word stops being glanceable: you lose the ability to read it quickly.
This is a random example:
en vÀndning
a turn, a twist (metaphorical); 2. a change; 3. [en ~ till det bÀttre] a change for the better; 4. [en ~ till det sÀmre] a change for the worse
In this example, points 3 and 4 are kindof superfluous. Theyâre phrases that donât really add to the meaning since theyâre exactly the same as meaning 2. So theyâre more like usage examples, and I donât think they are that important in this particular example at least. Nouns arenât very hard to use! Another problem there, apart from the wall-of-text effect, is that the examples quite often spoil the gender of the noun.
Thereâs a set of entries where Iâd love to see (more) usage examples, especially all those weird prepositions and conjunctions that Iâm seemingly having trouble learning without any context. Phrasal verbs, too: itâs super hard to tell apart all the avse / anse / inse / anta / vidta / införa / anföra etc.
I think it would be great for Memrise to support a separate âexamplesâ field, but I donât think it does.
Another thing Iâd love for Memrise to have is native support for synonyms. The along, alongside (not: âutmedâ) pattern is pretty awkward. Itâd be nicer to just accept synonyms by default, and then maybe you could play on hard mode where it would ask you to list all of the synonyms for something youâve learned so far. Not holding by breath though!
Like you, I have been trying speed review lately, because you can review 100 words at a time, even if none are up for âclassic reviewâ, also on the web version and I noticed the same problem. Some of the entries are simply too long for speed review. Although in my own case, I kind of know some of the entries off by heart because I wrote them so I can manage to get a good percentage right.
I meant well with the usage examples, but I think I will start to put them in mems and take some unnecessary ones out of the definitions.
To be honest, I donât think this is such a big problem. Some of the examples are there to try and disambiguate similar words and I have found phrases where ONLY the word in question can be used in the phrase quoted and not other similar ones.
I will make a note of the verbs you have listed above I believe âavseâ has been on my to-do list for a looooong time! As far as I can tell, âavseâ is most often used as a past tense form, âavseddâ or âavsettâ in the sense of the English âmeant forâ or âintended forâ. The verbs that contain the word âföraâ should be OK, because I am pretty sure I looked into those quite early on. I am sure I have a google docs file called âall those FĂRA verbsâ or something like that
memrise does support an example field, but as a lowly course contributor and not a course creator, I canât add new columns in an existing course. Only a course creator can do that. And sehiralti doesnât seem to be active any more.
I agree that the synonym solution of having something in brackets - the (ânot Xâ) solution is not very pretty or elegant - and I only use that solution when I havenât found good disambiguating examples.
On the other hand, however, I have ridiculously strong opinions about the whole concept of âsynoymsâ from a semantic, linguistic and pedagogic point of view and, secondly, this course had a big âfalse synonymâ problem because sehiraltiâs own knowledge of Swedish when he created these courses was obviously relatively limited and he had listed huge numbers of words as âsynonymsâ which absolutely were not synonyms at all.
When I first started doing the first part of this course, four years ago, many things were given as synonyms. It was only later that I realised that denoting large numbers of words as synonyms was leading to my learning a smaller number of words than is in the course. The very common verb, âatt te sigâ, used to have a synonym allowed and because it had no audio file, I never ever even noticed that I wasnât learning the verb âatt te sigâ. Every time I wrote the other word, it was accepted and I simply wasnât learning âatt te sigâ at all.
My reasons for being against the concept of âsynonymsâ are manifold and I wonât go into them now, but, suffice to say, for the time being, this is still âmyâ course and I only allow synonyms when they really are synonyms. According to a Swedish guy who is an expert on such matters, there are only two words in Swedish which are true synonyms, âbĂ€ggeâ and âbĂ„deâ (or is it âbĂ„daâ?, I donât honestly know!).
To put it in a nutshell, there are always some kind of differences in how words are used and even if two words may seem superficially similar, if you dig deeper, you will always find that they donât match up 100%. And, using synonyms in a language course means you risk learning fewer words and give a false impression of the words you are presenting.
I like the idea of a âhard modeâ, though, for âsynonymsâ, if they are included in a given course. But in this one, I am trying to eradicate them
Thanks for your time and your input and if you come across any of those tricky prepositions or verbs, just post a short note here and I will get to it.
and discovered that my hunch was correct. The verb is not used very often in the infinitive form. This is what I noted down:
Examples on KORP:
Att avse = only 2,833 examples
Avsedd = 10,085
Avsedda = 9,162
Avsett = 6,718
So I shall try to find a good usage example using one of the past participle forms.
By the way, the two websites I quoted are really good for working out how different words work. They are really invaluable sources, although it has to be noted that neither of these websites exclude ânot-so-good Swedishâ. Some of the examples on âexempelmeningarâ are taken from translations into Swedish, which can be problematic, and KORP includes blog entries and stuff from forums, so also not necessarily âperfectâ Swedish either.
My phone is about two years old, app updates itself regularly.