As far as I’m aware, Memrise has always behaved this way. For courses with strict typing turned off, either you skip all diacritics and special characters, or you include all of them.
And a small point of clarification, it’s not quite the same as strict typing. Strict typing means you must also match all punctuation and capitalization.
You’re totally right, it was always like this. With all the chaos produced by memrise, I got confused as well.
The same with Chinese, pelase fix this.
Looks like people editing words / Chinese characters do not know the difference between using ‘;’ and ‘,’ in Memrise.
Some examples where you need to type definition but part of it can’t be used as an answer. This is mega annoying and should be reedited ASAP.
Character 辛:
** Definition: suffering, hot (in taste, flavor), hard, laborious
** Available answers (besides full deifnition): spicy; tired; eighth; heavenly; stem
Character 歹
** Definition: chip, evil
** Available answers (besides full deifnition): evil; bad; wicked
Character 愿
** Definition: willing, desire
** Available answers (besides full deifnition): desire; to wish; to hope; sincere; wish; ready; promise
Character 斤
** Definition: half a kilo, axe (radical)
** Available answers (besides full deifnition): 0.5 kg; catty
Character 永
** Definition: forever, always
Character 即
** Definition: immediately, even if
** Available answers (besides full deifnition):at once; very quickly; to approach
Character 集
** Definition: to gather, to collect
** Available answers (besides full deifnition): volume; collectively
Semicolon come up as a separate word now 
This has been an issue now for months, how come it’s not yet fixed, please tell me how this could be considered anything but ridiculous and a complete failure on part of the dev and QA team?
This seems like a reasonable way to have the system work to me. If you just enter “guan1 xi5” and hit the “next” button or hit enter, it should mark your answer as correct. If you enter “guan1 xi5; guan1 xi4”, it should mark it as correct, too.
Having the semicolon there allows the people who want to to enter both answers, separated by the semicolon.
[quote=“neoncube, post:153, topic:5070”]
This seems like a reasonable way to have the system work to me. If you just enter “guan1 xi5” and hit the “next” button or hit enter, it should mark your answer as correct. If you enter “guan1 xi5; guan1 xi4”, it should mark it as correct, too.[/quote]
This is what it DOESN’T do; inputting “guan1 xi5” and hitting ENTER takes me to the second screen shot posted i.e. FAIL… 
Oh :\ Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed.
