@student-of-life hello again. Not sure if you still check the forums any longer but just wanted to again request being added as a contributor to the hsk 5 red and blue courses and to a lesser extent the hsk 4 courses. I would like to add hidden alts to take into consideration inconsistencies between the red and blue courses. There are a number of silly things i’m being marked wrong or partially wrong for (for example writing “firecracker” instead of “firecrackers”, this in particular something that should be allowed by the system) that are affecting the algorithm of my learned words. Many thanks!
Hello ! Newbie here. I think there’s a problem on the HSK1 course, with the words jue2 (to feel) and jiao4 (to sleep), because they are written with the same Chinese character (觉). When memrise prompts with 觉, there is no way to tell if one should enter “jue2” or “jiao4”. Can you please add pinyin and english alt’s to jue2 and jiao4 ? Thanks 
thanks @student-of-life for the useful courses. I have been training up till the HSK3 course now.
I would like to seek clarification on the word list/count that is used for this course.
For example, the official HSK1 has 150 words. But in this memrise HSK1 course, it has 400 words (excluding the pinyins).
Could anyone assist in clarifying why are there extra 250 words in the course? thanks.
Because there are a bunch of extra words in there to help you learn. These are usually ‘building block’ words such as the individual character components or the individual characters that make up larger words. You can ignore them if you want.
Hi,
I found an issue with the first lesson of HSK 1 course. The character for mother and the word for mother have no distinction between them and it makes it impossible to guess which answer is correct on a PC. The question was to select which answer means mother and both 妈 and 妈妈 was mentioned.
It would be useful to differentiate somehow.
@Norbert_Keresztes85
If you mean that the test prompted with “mother” in English and both 妈 and 妈妈 were mentioned, this is because the “wrong” multiple choice answers in tests are collected from the course’s database, so it’s a somewhat random selection of words to surround the correct entry. There might be some method to those word selections (like having a similarity in their pinyin, etc.), but since it’s randomly selected it’s kind of just bad luck in your particular test. It won’t be like that every time hopefully.
There’s a way to sort this out for courses I’ve heard people mention, but I don’t think that solution will really be practical for these large public courses.
@Lien
Hi Lien, would you mind adding me as a contributor for HSK 4 and 5 for red and blue versions?
@student-of-life seems to be on a break and I’d like to add some hidden alts so the courses correspond with each other. The problem could be that some of the words’ alts are using commas, so I kind of just want to look into it.
These are the courses I mean:
Yes, I get it why it’s working like this. My suggestion was to improve if
possible. It happened twice with mother and once with work (工，工作) already
and I just started checking out the HSK 1 version. If I go to HSK 6 and it
asks me to identity based on audio and it says shi4, there are several
characters that could be picked.
Is there a way to apply a filter to the random selection of answer choices
to avoid this issue? I haven’t created or contributed to a course, so I
don’t know the answer to that.
Hi, there my friend, I was on an unexpected break and now I’m back. I’m very sorry for abandoning you all. Please send me a PM regarding anything you need and I’ll get it sorted out asap.
SoL
Hello all, for HSK 5 (blue) I’ve changed the primary visible definition of
议论 (level 286/287)
from "debate"
to “to discuss”.
I couldn’t find any information in English dictionaries that supported “debate”. I looked on the Chinese internet for its usage and I think “debate” comes from two meanings:
First, 议论 is a certain formal sort of comment where a clear line of dissent is expressed when establishing a discussion. Also, 议论 can be used to discuss a problem, but though there can be the “debate” aspect by suggesting a problem/concern, I didn’t feel the term as close to something like 辩论 as it is to 讨论. So I’ve left “debate” in the alts but I don’t think keeping it as a primary helps anyone unless anyone has a better idea. Cheers!
Another picky change in HSK 5 (blue)
I’ve changed the main definition of 优惠 from “advantage” to "preferable"
The closest definition I could find close to advantage is “deal” or an “offer”, which could be considered an advantage I suppose, but that’s not the same as having the definition of “advantage”.
The same is with the normal definitions, “preferable” could lead to an advantage, but that’s an implication. There’s just too many words at this point with an “advantage” definition to leave this as it as and cast it into the pit of “useless words” because of the stock definitions in the course.
If anyone has an argument against this I’ll change it back in a heartbeat, but for now “advantage” has been set as an alt.
Hey there, have you happened to see that HSK 5 Red has 112 words that HSK 5 Blue is lacking? (Total words where some are repeated from previous HSK levels, not all hsk 5).
HSK Blue stops on the pinyin level 337 with the last word "ruguo"
HSK Red encounters “ruguo” in level 101, has additional words in 101, 102-104 all have 25 words, and 105 has 23 words.
Would adding new levels and words to the course screw up user progress for those who completed the blue course? Do you think anything should be done?
The addition of new levels and, or elements to the Blue course can only be a good thing. It will not damage any of the progress previous users have made, with the exception of the course bar showing that it is no longer complete.
The only thing to really consider is the usefulness of the new words, should they be added and to what end? I will leave that up to your good judgement.
Also, please note that I am currently studying psychology which has, atm, dominated most of my attention. This doesn’t mean to say, by any means, that I have abandoned Memrise, this forum, nor the Chinese courses that we (2) as a group are struggling to maintain.
SoL
@student-of-life
Hey, alright sounds good. I’ll try and get those up in the next day or two. I’m going to go ahead and add them just to even out discrepancies between the courses, but only HSK 5 level words vs. repeating the HSK1-4 words like the other levels do.
Good luck on the psych. studies!
Hi there
I’m hoping I’m on the right forum, it’s a little hard to find! I’m studying HSK Level 4 (red)
I really like the * system to denote single characters, but it is missing on 谢 to thank, which means that the definition of 感谢 is the same.
Hi!
I’m currently going through the HSK lessons, and just finished HSK 1. I skipped 2 and decided just to start 3. I noticed that you don’t list HSK 1-3 on the courses that you cover, but all of them have links that lead to this thread.
Do you still maintain them? If not, who does?
Edit:
Just going to drop this hear for safe keeping. I’ll move it somewhere else if you don’t maintain HSK1-3
Seems like “to like” is order specific in their pinyin. That seems silly to me.
Hey, yeah I remember a lot of the “*” marks were missing when I was taking the course also. I’ll fix 谢 and try to fix the others as time allows 
@Tim_Yuan21
I’m not a mod for 1-3 but @student-of-life might be.
As for your mention of 喜欢’s order, I don’t think this course works particularly well with the tapping tests. In short - turn off tapping tests.
It’s like this, when you create a course, there are main answers (what is always displayed), alternate answers (answers displayed when you look at more info), and hidden answers (answers only mods can see that either make sense but are technically not the official answer, or perhaps an alternate definition of the word that this entry isn’t concerning).
In the main answers, as a creator you can put multiple answers separated by a semi-colon as in your example. Sometimes this is because you want both answers to be directly associated with the word always. Tapping tests, however make this full entry necessary, whereas in typing only one would work (or any of the alternate or hidden answers.)
So the problem here is the memrise tapping system’s recognition function. This could be remedied if the HSK 3 mod were to alter the answer so that one pinyin entry is an “alternate” instead of main, but I would highly recommend just turning off the tapping tests for now. As my own two cents here, some people get a lot of benefit from the tapping tests, but I only see their use in courses where a sentence is needed as an answer. I would highly recommend using typing and as you progress in the HSK levels, test yourself in multiple directions (display English - you type Chinese character + displays character - you type English) to aid in both passive and active recall for speaking/writing and listening/reading.
1 Like
Very thorough response. Thank you for the explanation.
How does the answer bank for multiple choice questions work? Are you able to choose what the question draws from as responses? I noticed a lot of questions in HSK where there were multiple answers that could work for the question asked.
For example the course may ask for a translation for “table” and offer both 桌子 and 桌 as possible choices.
@Tim_Yuan21 Yeah, this gets really annoying later on when you have a huge amount of synonyms in your head/course and you basically partially memorize characters by the order of the definitions (ie. “oh the answer for this one is ‘prevent; hinder’ not ‘hinder; prevent’”), but it only happens for select groups of words with similar meanings. I make my own private courses for learning certain characters and i’ll often type definitions as: “prevent (first)” “prevent (second)”, etc.
To answer your question though, the multiple choice selection I believe is coming from the word bank dictionary of a word. So if there’s a list of words someone made for something and entered it into a dictionary called “Chinese”, then those words will be part. If a course uses words from multiple word dictionaries, I believe answers can come from both dictionaries. The kicker, is that if you do something like, create a word, realize the answer is too similar to another, then change it, the old too similar answer will still exist in the server somewhere and pop up. Someone wrote up a bit of a troublesome way to get rid of these odd answers in the old forums, but I couldn’t say what it was.