So I finally worked out a pattern to a behavior that had me puzzled when a course had multiple entries with the same “native” language word (i.e. if it’s a German course for English speakers, two entries with the same English word but with different German words) - it will only accept the alternative as “green” (the one other than the entry that it had internally decided to show) if you type it WITHOUT ACCENTS. With the accents it will mark it “yellow”.
I’ve confirmed this many times now, and just did so again - a course I’m learning has
Memory - die Erinnerung
Memory - das Gedächtnis
If Memrise has internally picked the first entry as then next to learn/review and shown me the word “Memory” I must type “das Gedachtnis” (which is not a real word) or “die Erinnerung” to be marked green.
While this is clearly a bug (which I’m not bothering to report because out of the dozens of bugs I have reported in the past none have ever been shown any attention) it is good to finally understand what the bug actually is.
Unfortunately in general Memrise tends to encourage typing words without their accents - I assume this is not restricted to German, but is particularly problematic where such accents really do matter (e.g. “wären” vs “waren”) and where many courses don’t have the audio to help you remember what the actual word is.
das Gedächnis and die Erinnerung are not the same in German.
“Das Gedächtnis ist die Gesamtheit der Erinnerungen.”
Das Gedächnis is the place where all of the memories are stored. The whole things. Die Erinnerung is a single memory of a event, act, happening. Or some Erinnerungen, but not all of it.
Both “die Erinnerung” and “das Gedächtnis” can be translated in memory of somebody or something.
While good to know, it doesn’t change the point raised. Actually in my own courses I usually do manage to find some way to distinguish two words that might typically be translated as the same English word, but it’s not always possible.
NB ‘Memory’ even has a third meaning in English relating to the tendency of materials to hold certain shapes, can Gedächtnis be used in this way?
“Memory” as such does not refer in English to the memory of matter (matter here in its Greek “hyle/ὕλη” meaning, but maybe “shape memory material” or related? Do you mean “shape memory alloy”? (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formgedächtnislegierung), for example?
.Ä. ü, ö are not accents, but Umlauts (Umlauts is the English plural form, the German plural form is Umlaute)
(note: Umlaut and Ablaut are terms used all over the earth (by linguists); they mark the change of vowel into a semivowel (or into a diphthong, in fact, say some)
if you want Gedächtnis and Erinnerung to be synonyms, than you probably refer to “commemoration”. Use https://dict.leo.org/, it is one of the best dict online
While it will accept “Gedachtnis” (without the umlaut, and yes I knew the term Hydro, but was trying to be general, I don’t believe this is a problem specific to umlauts) when it’s actually asking about “Erinnerung”, it’s NOT true the other way around.
In other words, if it presents you with “Memory” then you can always type Gedachtnis and have it accepted, but there’s no way to tell whether Erinnerung or Gedächtnis (with umlaut) will be accepted.
If, on the other hand, a course happened to have 2 entries both with “the” as the learner’s language word, and “das” and “die” as the learning language words, if you were presented with “the” there would simply be no way at all to be sure of getting a correct answer.
To point this out as bizarre is probably something of understatement.
What I would like to see is that when Memrise decides to test you on a word that has two entries with the same “native” language word, it should automatically provide you with a hint telling you not to enter the word from the other language. E.g.
“memory”
(not “die Erinnerung”)
It should then only accept das Gedächtnis with the umlaut. It is misspelled without it (and yes I know strict typing solves this but that introduces other issues for many courses, and you don’t always have the option to turn that on).
Don’t quite understand your last sentence - what does it mean to “want” two words that obviously don’t quite refer to the same thing to be synonyms?
The English word “memory” is a perfectly good translation for both words, but that’s just because the English word happens to refer to multiple phenomena.
As it happens I just got made a contributor for this course, so I’m changing it to
das Gedächtnis - memory, recall
die Erinnerung - memory, reminder
This is based on how the words are most often used/translated from Linguee and reverso.context.net
I would say though that there examples of Erinnerung being used that would seem to refer to what redux describes as “the place where…memories are stored”, and not a single recollection of an event.
At any rate, flashcard courses are in general very poor ways to learn subtle distinctions between similar words. You need to hear/read the words in context.