Difficult words on iOS - the way it is working - is it a bug or a feature?
Let’s say I have 10 words to review.
I answer correctly on 3 of them, 7 of them incorrectly.
Only 2 words get added to Difficult words, in my opinion they are not the most difficult ones.
How is it working? Does Memorise use here an AI algorithm to try to decide which words were difficult and which ones were mistyped or “fat-finger” typed / tapped?
If yes, then I would say it would be better to have an option to switch that algorithm off and just add all the mistakes to the Difficult Words list. And, after a review session, allow the user to select and remove some of those words from the list.
But please let me know if the behaviour I observe is what is expected. I work most of the time on courses I created myself but the same happens on the original courses created by Memrise.
There’s sometimes a delay when synchronizing the output from the session taken and resync back to app with the words that were missed. Could take 2-4 minutes or so.
In that case I should see new Difficult Words for that course being added after a few minutes. But that does not happen. What I observe is that Difficult Words are added only directly after a review session of 10 words. Nothing gets added with delay to Difficult Words from the previous 10-word review sessions.
Also, I would imagine that in such cases Memrise app would keep the difficult words in memory whether or not it can sync them with the server, as it does with each word being reviewed.
That’s why I think there is another explanation for this behaviour.
There is, as far as I know, an AI involved in the iOS app that tries to understand which mistakes should lead to an item becoming flagged as a difficult words and which should not.
I’m pretty sure there was an announcement about the AI for difficult words on iOS at some point.
It’s good that they experiment with AI to make the application even better.
But in this particular case we really need an option in the settings to say that all mistakes should be flagged as Difficult Words (and, if possible, a way to unflag some of them manually)
You can remove items from the difficult words list on the website but not in the iOS app. There is some room for improvement in that app, it is for example not possible to ignore words in the iOS app.
