In giving an accurate definition for a word, course creators often write down several words to get at a more precise definition of the equivalent in the foreign language. Though this is useful as a reference, it’s counter productive for learning. I look at the first word or two in the definition and know the answer, without taking in all the other definitions that provide a more accurate understanding of the word. So, I’m left with an inaccurate idea of the word I aimed to learn.
Of course I could train myself to take more time in looking at all the definitions before choosing an answer, but this is also somewhat useless: my brain, already having got the satisfaction of knowing the right answer, ceases to process the information in a way that would encourage learning.
In other words, Memrise takes advantage of a quiz system to ease learning and make the process more efficient. It would be useful to take this a step further by allowing course creators to put more than one version of a definition for a given entry - which could then be randomly presented to the learner.
In other words, what memrise already allows with images. You can have an image column and upload multiple image files for the same item. If you set a level to “prompt with” the image, each review will show one randomly selected image from the ones uploaded for that item.
Potentially useful, but sadly, there’s no hope memrise will even consider your suggestion, let alone do it. They’ve directly told us not to make suggestions, that they won’t read suggestions, and that anything suggested here (or any course creation feature) is considered a “web” issue and they don’t care about the web beyond fixing simple bugs. Mobile is all that matters - and even though mobile users take the courses that people make on the web, that doesn’t count. Course creation is not mobile and therefore not worthy of their time or attention.
if you save your (very short) definitions as pictures and then test on words and prompt with pictures you’ll get a random definition every time (if you have put more than 1 pic behind a test entry).
