Dealing with significant and "inconsistent" course overlaps

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As I learn more words (10K+) I notice a lot of time is spent reviewing
"duplicate" words/phrases which have differing meanings/translations across courses.
Causing memory/learning interference and “wasted” or poor use of review time.

So I did an analysis and found that out of 14000 words/phrases.
there was an overlap between courses of about 3600 words!

Some Spanish/English examples…

contar -> to tell, to count
contar -> to narrate

bastante -> quite
bastante -> rather
bastante -> fairly
bastante -> rather, fairly
bastante -> quite, enough, quite a bit

deber -> must, to have to
deber -> should, to owe
deber -> must, ought to

qué pasa -> What’s up?
qué pasa -> What’s happening?
qué pasa -> How are you?

This problem is not unique to Memrise, you can have the same issue
when using shared Anki decks, or other learning tools.
Perhaps this is why Memrise got rid of the ignore duplicates feature.

I’ve been going through these cross course duplicates trying to resolve
them and it is taking quite a bit of time.

Any suggestions on how to deal with this? What approaches do you use?
(I suppose the answer might depend a bit on learning platform as well)

I know some people here have even more items in their learning count
and I can’t imagine how they would deal with this.

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1, Ignore the duplicates and leave only the most common one.
2, Ignore all occurrences, move the item to an own course with all translations
3, Contact the course creators to add some hint to the items to differentiate them

It is really annoying that it’s not possible to search the learned words. So I try to block duplicates when planting.
It would be great if someone could make search script.

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I made a userscript yesterday to allow editing prompts for certain words - e.g. so you could change “qué pasa” to “qué pasa (not What’s up? or How are you?)” to avoid ambiguity.

Just uploaded it here, take a look and see what you think - when you get to a word with a bad definition, click “Term Editor” on the left and type a replacement, then press OK and unpause. It will save to your browser (won’t sync to other browsers or apps).

N.b. you will need a userscript manager, such as Tampermonkey, to install the script.

@telenceph @VT22

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  1. This is likely the most efficient approach (if you accept some data loss)
  2. I’m doing something like that for some items
  3. On memrise, I’ve done that within a course but not for across course duplicates
    For anki it is easy to just edit the notes and add hints

Interesting idea, I tend to clear my browser cache regularrily.
I assume doing that would blow away the data the script uses?

Thanks for the suggestions

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I assume doing that would blow away the data the script uses?

It shouldn’t do so, because data is stored within your userscript manager’s local storage (Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey) rather than the website’s cookies or local storage.

If it does clear it for some reason, there’s an export button and import button which means you can save the stored data in a text file before clearing your data, then import it again afterwards.