This is one of the flaws of the “listening skills”; as for the “official” Chinese courses, one has to type deng or shi or si-yue and not si yue or what), or similar - and learns by doing so exaclty … what?
Noticed something on the newer version of Chinese 2 at one of the hanzi levels.
Instead of the usual thing of seeing a hanzi and clicking the english word, or seeing the english word and clicking the hanzi… I’m getting some where it gives me audio and has me click the English word… obviously that’s not usually how the hanzi levels go and dosn’t really make any sense. (This was in the android app version.)
((Also it would be super awesome if somehow the hanzi vs other types of levels could be separated into different lessons entirely (i.e Chinese 2 vs Chinese Simplified Hanzi 2 as an example of possible names). My reason for this desire is because my in-laws use Traditional only, so I’m primarily learning Traditional and am not using memrise courses for my hanzi study. So far I’m doing it, but it’d be better to have the option to keep them seperate.
I intended to do simplified at a later date after learning traditional.))
Hi @RainbowMeow, thanks for your post! The Chinese character levels had been missing audios for a long time and we finally uploaded audios for them recently. That’s why you’re prompted with audio tests now.
The problem is that you didn’t learn the pronunciation before (because there were no audios) so you wouldn’t know what to answer now. I totally understand you but the algorithm is not perfect at dealing with such updates so it’d be best to re-learn the characters, with audios this time since it’s an important element of the language. We fixed a bug recently so it should be much smoother to go through the Chinese character levels now.
Or as you said, if you don’t want to learn characters yet, you can skip the character levels entirely. Regarding the course structure you mentioned - a pinyin course and a character course, that’s something on our list to solve as well so hopefully we can have a better structure for the Chinese courses soon.
Thanks for flagging @JoshTaylor5d53! @FergusORegan mentioned a few more in this thread and I can confirm they’ve all be corrected. If you log out and log in again you should see the changes implemented. Also as mentioned in the other thread, I’ll be doing a Mandarin 3 course auditing to make sure all tones are marked correctly.
Actually the problem wasn’t that I didn’t know how to answer them (I did, because memrise isn’t my only source of study. :P) The problem was more that previously the levels seemed intended to teach you the visual hanzi and this was the first time of it doing purely sound (which is a bit odd for a hanzi specific level, since the non-hanzi levels involve sound to english. Rather than this giving me a sound and asking me to click the -hanzi- it was giving me the sound and asking me to click the -English- (which dosn’t make sense in a hanzi level.
However, I note that very recently another new version of Chinese 2 was made, so I’m not sure if the issue I experienced in the above mentioned version (version 2?) exists in the newest Chinese 2 (version 3?).
Hi, suggestion. I know Memrise is based out of London, but obviously users from all over.
" wó xiǎng shàng cè-suǒ - I need to go to the loo " Obviously “loo” is fairly common in speech in the UK, but it’s not something used in some other English speaking countries (def unused where I am atm). It might be best to use a different wording or have an alternate as well. (Like how some have xxx / xxx .)
Btw, the thing I raised in previous posts that you thought was fixed in an update was never fixed, still happens. Shen-me shi-hou requires acute accents to be manually implemented to be accepted.
Hi @Alexroseajr, we added the version without accents to be accepted in Mandarin 1 so it should mark you as correct. By the way, when I tried to learn that item I never got tapping or typing tests, only multiple choices. Would you mind doing a screen recording of that item since we can’t reproduce the issue on our end?
I have a browser extension that forces all answers in all courses to be typed, I don’t learn anything from multiple choice, most of the time you can squint and get the right answer from sentence length. Failing that multiple choice simply teaches me to identify one/two key words rather than actually learning the phrase (or especially the tones). So in the course it would not naturally come up but it does for me.
99% of phrases work fine but shén-me shí-hou requires the accents (which I can do with Alt Gr if I remember it’s being stringent) and shang-ge xing-qi - which I can’t type because it has the i with bar accents on xing and qi that I have no idea how to type on a keyboard without altcodes.
These courses are driving me nuts.
There is no need for the use of “-” yet the courses insist on adding them in the correct place.
So a lot of the time I know the answers but I cannot remember where the courses decided to
put the “-”. And for different words/phrases the rules seem to be different as well.
When inputting responses, the “-” characters should simply be ignored.
Also one of the courses claims “dui le” means “by the way” , I think it should be “that’s right” ?
Hi @Alexroseajr, I see, that could be a browser extension compatibility issue I guess. We do have the no accent version added in our database as an acceptable answer and we are working as we speak to make the marking rule easier in general when it comes to spaces, hyphens, accents etc. Bear with us!
It shouldn’t have anything to do with the browser extention. I’ve used it for years on every russian course, and the japanese and korean courses.
The only thing this does is force you to type. So, I can see how it would accidentally be a browser add on problem - in that, the course was never supposed to be consumed this way so no one thought to allow shenme shihao and no one else ever complained about it because practically no one uses memrise the way I do. But it doesn’t override any core memrise functionality, it uses the same vocab system as everywhere else, and every other word in the course works.
In every other question, once it says I’m wrong, if I start typing, without accents, it will on-the-fly keep my answer green. On these questions, as soon as I don’t type with the acute accent it will instantly turn to red, automatically being refused. Now, I’ve never made a memrise deck so I don’t know how synonyms work in that case, all I know is that at the time I last posted it definitely was not working.
I’m about to go to bed but I’ll even record a video next time it happens.
hi @delegatevoid, thanks for your post. We are working as we speak to make the marking rule easier when it comes to spaces, hyphens and accents etc. Hopefully it will go into production soon!
I completely agree with delegatevoid. I find it especially frustrating since I use multiple apps as well as formal learning books, and nowhere uses this sort of thing in the pinyin. Couple this with the fact that sometimes the little automatic progression thing fails to notice you’ve entered the correct thing and you could be messing with it for a long time. (It’s easier to notice this has happened when not messing with hyphens.)
Wanted to link this article from the BBC to kind of highlight one thing I find to be a bit of an issue with -some- entries.
Sometimes country specific slang is used as the desired English answer to a Chinese term, but obviously while the company is based in London, they intend to market to the whole world. So a more global term is needed. Obviously in things like “British English for Chinese Speakers” this makes sense, but not for “Mandarin for English speakers” etc.
For example: in one level of Mandarin we are given 五塊錢 and 十塊錢. The respective English desired for these is “a fiver” and “a tenner”. There are other very similar sort of things but I can’t remember them currently.
There are other very similar sort of things but I can’t remember them currently.