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.
All of a sudden Chinese characters in the official course are appearing with audio. It’s like changing rules amidst the game, especially if you’ve learnt these characters already, and almost impossible to recognize them without pinyin. Listening exercises for characters make no sense.
I think that Chinese course by Memrise is difficult enough, but by adding these audio files you are making it even more difficult. Given the fact it’s not a european language and whatnot, maybe, it should be more lenient learning. Just an opinion.
Hi @RainbowMeow or 彩虹喵 , thanks for sharing this! It might be frustrating to hear but it’s true that currently in our official courses, “English” does refer to “British English” and we actually made the effort to make it sound “British”. This is due to the resources we have. At the moment we cover British English and American English but not other variants yet I understand your point and we’ll do our best to expand to more languages and variants as soon as we can.
Hi @malkeynz, a more flexible marking for pinyin has been rolled out to some of the Android users (not 100% yet) but feel free to update the app in the coming days! iOS is still working in progress but I’ll make sure to keep flagging the importance to our development team and have it implemented soon as well.
Hi @Hombre_sin_nombre, thanks for setting the tone of the message with a head’s up Btw I’m impressed with the number of languages you covered!
The main problem here is that we do have different needs from users who want to learn just pinyin and those who want to learn Chinese characters (the meaning, the sound and the shape) and we are not doing a good job fulfilling the different needs by having one course for everyone. I’m actually working on a plan to improve the Chinese course structure.
I agree with what you said that the Chinese course is difficult but I think it’s more of the course structure’s fault rather than the audios. And I also agree that we should make Chinese learning more lenient overall and that’s why we fixed the character levels (previously it asked you to answer English definitions in tapping tests and you had to answer in a specific order) and also tried to make pinyin marking more flexible (previously you had to put hyphens, spaces etc in a specific order). We’ll keep the improvements going and make our Chinese course more learner friendly!
Spaces don’t matter anymore (on web at least), which is a nice, so thanks for getting that change made.
However now accents are too permissive: I can give my answers the completely wrong tones (I use the Pinyinput input method) and it still marks them as correct. I understand that it needs to cater for people who don’t enter tones at all, but if I’m making the effort to enter tones then it should at least ensure that I’m getting them right. Now the only way to know is to listen to the audio to try and judge if they were in fact correct (which is tricky sometimes). Please change this back to the way it was previously.
Would it be possible to make a Chinese course that makes new words appear as both hanzi and pinyin? Learning Pinyin is great for beginners but down the road not being able to read will cause all sorts of problems!
Hi, I’ve been enjoying learning Mandarin Chinese for a while.
Memrise decided it wanted to start showing me Chinese letters.
But it takes forever with those weird videos trying to somehow visualize the letters. I don’t know if it actually works or not for those who don’t come from east Asia. I’m from Korea and we all had to learn Chinese characters in school. So I don’t need those those videos to help me memorize the Characters. I just need the flashcards and sounds. Some reminders mostly. I understand in China they use simplified versions so I’d have to memorize some more. But I feel like the videos of someone drawing a picture are just unnecessary. Is there any way to turn them off?
It’s kind of useless to show the animation of the character being drawn, only to ask you to select it. It’s right there in front of you so it doesn’t test you.
Greetings, at the very beginning of the Mandarin Chinese 1 course there is a problem, small but annoying. There are two translations: “bu shi” -> “no; not” and “bu” -> “no; not”. When the system asks for translation of “no; not”, there is no way to know if the reply should be “bu” or “bu shi” and only one is accepted.
Hello. I’m nonbinary and use they and them as singular pronouns. (In English, singular “they” came before singular “you”.) Other plural pronouns in the course have (plural) after them in English to demarcate them as such. Every time I encounter “they/them” I have to stop and think a moment, and every time I get a little sad and a little frustrated that you haven’t added “(plural)” to the end.
Could you please add the text “(plural)” after “they/them”? I’m not asking for you to even include whatever a nonbinary singular they would be in Mandarin—I have no idea if that’s a thing yet. I’m just asking for this little demarcation that will help not just me but a lot of people (especially younger people) for whom “they” is not plural in all cases. Thanks.
I’m not sure what changed, but recently, when I do reviews of vocab on the Mandarin course, it’ll provide sounds and ask me to pick a meaning. I will answer, and the characters for the sound will come up in the green correct screen. However, previously, the pinyin would also appear. This is very helpful as I am still making the transition from pinyin to characters. However, now only the characters appear and this effect is not present. Is there any way I can turn on pinyin and characters for the response prompt?
Greetings, at the very beginning of the Mandarin Chinese 1 course there is a problem, small but annoying. There are two translations: “bu shi” → “no; not” and “bu” → “no; not”. When the system asks for translation of “no; not”, there is no way to know if the reply should be “bu” or “bu shi” and only one is accepted.
There are other very similar sort of things but I can’t remember them currently.
, thanks for sharing this! It might be frustrating to hear but it’s true that currently in our official courses, “English” does refer to “British English” and we actually made the effort to make it sound “British”. This is due to the resources we have. At the moment we cover British English and American English but not other variants yet 
I understand your point and we’ll do our best to expand to more languages and variants as soon as we can.
Btw I’m impressed with the number of languages you covered!
