Hey guys,
Thank you all for reporting this issue here (and for sending me emails) 
I double checked the Chinese course for English (US) speakers which turned out to be the one where this appeared and have amended it.
You should have this correct version now as below.
Feel free to email me ([email protected]) if you have any other questions (Chinese courses, Memrise experience in general, or even food 
!
Have a lovely day you all!
Best,
Yi
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This has been fixed, thanks Shansaylor!
Hi there, this has now been fixed. Thanks for reporting!
No problem! 
Hey,
I’m currently working my way through Mandarin Chinese 2. In addition to the issue about compound-word splitting there are two other things I noticed:
Sometimes english verbs require the “to” sometimes they don’t. For example for 吃, “to eat” is correct while “eat” is not. This is very annoying and I hope it gets fixed.
Also, and more specifically for words whose pinyin contains the umlaut ü, it is not often recognized correctly. For 女儿 the correct pinyin is “nüer”. However when typing that it is marked as incorrect and only “nuer” is accepted. I should add that I am a user of a German keyboard therefore typing umlauts is easy for me. I imagine that “nuer” is added as a correct answer to make it easier for users of english keyboards however I wish that the correct pinyin would be a valid answer, too.
Hey Kay,
Thanks for your comment!
Regarding “to eat”, “to” is mainly added before verbs to differentiate them from nouns so users are clear about the part of speech. The same goes to “the”, e.g. “to promise” vs “the promise”. So we kept this form in English across all languages for consistency.
As to “nüer” and “nuer”, we do allow users to pass if they type “nüer”, “nuer” or “nver”, partly because of the keyboard issue you mentioned and also because that in real life scenario, most Chinese users would be typing pinyin on their keyboard to locate characters and in that case, even on Chinese keyboard, there is no “ü” and people type “v” instead and it will be recognised as “ü”.
However, we will definitely look into ways to solve the confusion here (maybe use “v” to represent “ü” so it can be typed regardless of the keyboard). 
Best,
Yi
I’m not taking the official courses but just to give my opinion as someone who went through Whately’s courses and currently working through HSK5 mixed with self-made courses, you should really think through how your flexibility is implemented in Chinese vs. other languages. Chinese has noun/verbs as you know and a different way of conjugation.
I actually have a handful of words that through daily speech/conversation I end up realizing are the same as another word. Or words that mean something different or are more flexible than I thought, and these words are deeply rooted incorrectly simply because of the lack of flexibility in early courses. Unless you’re making a course strictly to prepare students for something like the exact definitions of a test, like the HSK, I’m of the opinion that a huge number of accepted answers but one or two primary answers for each word is the best way to go. By that, I mean “to eat” may be your default display, but “eat”, “to eat” “to consume” should all be accepted. Otherwise you end up with learners who are programmed with limited definitions in their heads.
Hi Wuxian,
Many thanks for sharing your feedback-we really appreciate it!
The good news is that we are currently testing a new tool which would allow us to add more alternatives to the words thus increasing flexibility of the test.
However, as to the scenarios you mentioned, it would not always be possible to predict answers due to the various meanings of words and the large pool of synonyms in Chinese! Also, users might be put off if they are exposed to too many meanings of one word at the beginning. Therefore, we are trying to find a balance here and help users master core words (core meanings) first so they are able to express themselves and not finding it frustrating not to be able to remember all the meanings. Then after that, it would be easier for them to pick up other meanings and synonyms at a later stage. Actually you might already found out that each speaker has his/her own preferred words/phrases and keeps using same words in most of the conversations. But I agree with you that knowing as many of them would help with comprehension.
My suggestion would be to interpret the meaning of the words flexibly, e.g. when A=B is taught in the course, it doesn’t mean that A can’t be C or D. However, we will definitely take this into account in our course design and maybe add more meanings or synonyms at higher levels after the users master the basics. If you have other suggestions on this, please do let me know!
Also, I noticed that you mentioned you are not using the official courses at the moment. If you are interested in giving it a try please let me know because we might have trial version coming up at some point and it would be great to have feedback from users like you. Just let me know if you are up for it and I’ll make sure to update you once it’s available.
Best,
Yi
Hey,
I’d like to ask whether the irregular spacing in the pinyin of colours (Course 2, level 28) is intentional? For example it is “lánsè” and “hēisè” but “zě sè” and “bái sè”, which I find utterly confusing. How do I know which way is correct for each colour?
Regards,
Kay
maybe @yi.liu can help with that, from what I know in other courses it is a consistent form of a space between each word. Maybe for the official courses they are still deciding on the spacing issues. It’s probably just a mistake though that anyone with course creator access to the courses can change.
Thanks for your messages! @Kay-S @Wuxian
The good news is that we don’t need to worry too much about spacing in pinyin because pinyin itself won’t appear in the written form of communications. 
However, in Chinese courses (Memrise and others), spaces tend to be added in pinyin only to help learners identify meaning units. E.g. My name (我的名字）, is likely to be marked in pinyin as “wǒde míngzi” so users can associate this phrase with the words they learnt - “my” and “name”. That said, both “lánsè” and “lán sè” would be considered correct and technically users should pass the test with either form (if not, let us know and we can amend it on our side).
Does that make Chinese learning easier?!
Best,
Yi
Thanks for your reply! It’s encouraging to hear that pinyin spacing does not hold that much significance and I do appreciate the approach to signify meaning units. However, given that in the mentioned course level, colour names are learned side-by-side it would be incredibly helpful if both ways of writing were accepted for all words instead of having some one way and some the other way and the other way only. I would be grateful if this could be fixed! Words I’m talking about are:
hongse / hong se
lanse / lan se
huángsè / huáng sè
lǜsè / lǜ sè
hēisè / hēi sè
zǐsè / zǐ sè
báisè / bái sè
chéngsè / chéng sè
zōngsè /zōng sè
huīsè / huī sè
jīnsè / jīn sè
谢谢！
-Kay
@yi.liu gave a good explanation here, but I agree with you that both ways should be accepted. For the last 5 years the primary way of entering pinyin has been with a space, I think that’s because of the ease of entering it in this kind of format.
It makes even more sense to have the spacing between each word format as dominant if you look here:
Pinyin Rules on Wikipedia
Specifically if you look beneath “1. General” and under ".3 Combined meaning (4 or more characters)"
you’ll see that in 4 character words, you break up the word into its base words or leave all four together if the word only gets its meaning with them all connected. In a format like memrise where we sometimes learn multiple character word meanings before learning the base words, it’s just adding another task to keep track of. Especially since, as yi.liu mentioned, pinyin isn’t used in written communication much, it’s devoting way too much time and adding the possibility of error to a system that will reset the word’s algorithm and already doesn’t allow the user to override incorrect input.
Hello again! Found another error in Mandarin Chinese 3. In section 8, there
is some incorrect audio with the words.
Thanks!
Shannon
Hi Shannon,
Thanks for flagging this!
The wrong audio has now been removed from this course.
Best,
Yi
Cool. Thanks!
Hi guys, I created a chinese quiz application based on the memrise Mandarin Chinese series. It’s an excellent tool to revise difficult words offline and it can be updated with new words as your list of vocabulary increases. head over to github and install.
It requires Python 3 installed on your computer and I would love feedback from the community to help improve its use.
1 again one of the many pinyin issues of this course
hēisè correct while hēi sè not correct, lánsè corect but lán sè not, although all other colours are chéng sè.
I do understand that the very memrise algorithm is “schuldig im Sinne der Anklage”, however… the course should be teaching mandarin chinese, not algorithms shortages
2 bzw, I am taking Mandarin Chinese for British English speakers (not US), it should be “colours”, and not “colors”
3 the meet the native feature has a strange prompt, given that the native speaks Chinese of course (what “English above”??? - and that in my setting the “tapping” thing is deactivated:
Hey there, thanks for reporting these! Please check the below:
1 we’ve allowed either way to be accepted, would you mind logging out and logging in? Let me know if it’s still not working.
2 we checked the items about “colours” and it is “colours” in the UK course and “colors” in the US course. Could you possibly send me screenshot of the wrong item in case I missed any?
3 we are on this and I’ll update you once I hear more.
Many thanks again!
Yi
I am unable to find one single site teaching 化 as “chemical” but for memrise
just a couple of examples…
https://de.langenscheidt.com/deutsch-chinesisch/search?term=化&q_cat=%2Fdeutsch-chinesisch%2F (verändern - change; etc)
http://hanzidb.org/character/化 (change, convert, reform; -ize)
http://www.xiaoma.info/hanzi.php?hz=化&fhz=化 (to make into; to change into; -ization; to… -ize; to transform; abbr. for 化学)
http://dict.youdao.com/search?le=eng&q=化&tab=&keyfrom=dict2.top (-ize. -ise, change, melt, convert)
