Hey all, I am wondering if the words I learn in one course will apply to the words learned in another (if they are in fact in both courses). I am currently working on the “First 5000 Words of Spanish” and “Learn Spanish Conjugation.” So my question is will the words I learn in one course, and overlap into the other, give me credit in the other course as well or will I have to go through the process twice? I’m asking this more because when I am done with the 5000 words course I want to add another similar course but am expecting they have a lot of the same words and would rather avoid redoing them. Plus I think it would help me keep track of how many words are in my vocab by showing that I have already learned this many words in this course from the previous one I completed.
The courses run independently. There used to be an ‘auto ignore’ feature which let you ignore all the words in a course that you had already learned in an earlier course, but it was removed some months ago, mainly because of problems mis-identifying words in languages not using the Roman alphabet, much to many people’s disappointment.
You can still ‘ignore’ items individually (see here) but it can be a long-winded process.
There was some discussion of the ‘auto ignore’ function in this earlier topic here.
However, there is a user script which will let you do ‘auto ignore’ (which should be accurate for Spanish language courses). You’ll find it in the list of user scripts here.
The word count is not a particularly accurate measure of “words” learned because many courses include phrases (which are counted in the same way as a single word). “Items learned” would be a better name, not least because many people do a mix of language and non-language courses, and items from both get added into a single total.
There used to be a function that would let you auto-ignore words that you’d already learned, but Memrise removed it. It wasn’t perfect, though. It only worked if the courses used the same database and the entries were exact matches.
Now that the auto-ignore feature is gone, you’ll have to ignore already-learned items manually. If you’re learning on the website, there are two ways to do it.
1: Go to the course page, click on the lesson, and click the ignore button on the right above the list of words. Check the boxes of the words you know you know, and then click save at the bottom.
2: Learn as normal. On the learning screen, when you’re presented with a word you already know, press “i” or click the circle with the line through it that’s next to the flower/seed/plant icon.
I was actually using memrise back in the early days, the original beta. I think then it was for mandarin only.
The best thing about it back then was all courses pulled words from a central database of words, so you could learn 100% of a base or introductory course, then you could see what percent of other courses you already knew. I found it far easier to learn by then choosing courses with some focus point where I already knew most of the words. Unfortunately this disappeared, and a lot of beta users including myself were not very happy about it.
I’ve actually just come back after a few years to see if this was finally fixed. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like it has been, as others have said you need to manually ignore words. For languages like mandarin where each word is a fixed character, this really is a joke.
It’s quite a shame because otherwise the website is great.
