First, I removed the last image since it duplicated the first. But to respond to your comment here, I don’t think your presumption is correct since forms of essere don’t seem to have any parenthetical description such as “(permanent state)” after them. I did a listing to check this and here is what it looks like for essere and stare:
As you can see, because of your fix the stare forms are now “(temporary state)” instead of “(permanent state)”
After considering this problem and studying detailed tables for essere and stare I believe a better approach would be to use “(stare)” instead of “(temporary state)” to indicate to the user that “stare” is meant rather than “essere”.
Here are my reasons:
it’s simple
it avoids any interpretation/translation issues
in the tables, stare & essere sometimes have identical conjugated forms so this helps later in the course
long hints in Memrise are problematic because of word wrap issues
while being drilled, it’s easier for the user to get used to short rather than long descriptions
Although one might argue “(essere)” should be added to indicate the “essere” forms I would say this is unnecessary both because of simplicity and the fact that essere is more common.
On the other hand, there are all the others in that list of reasons I gave, plus the fact that Memrise activities are more like drills than tests. On a test, it defeats the whole purpose if you “give it away”, but with drills you’ve already seen it many times and are working on making it habitual, so you’re more likely to realize that you’re going to be distinguishing ‘essere’ vs. ‘stare’ forms.
At least that’s how it works for me – as soon as I see that there’s a clue (regardless of it was ‘permanent’ or ‘temporary’) I know that I needed to answer with some form of ‘stare’ rather than ‘essere’
I repeat: you make a good point, and I think it’s reasonable to go either way. Once again, I would like to see someone who really knows Italian and about teaching Italian to help resolve this difficulty.
