Dodgy calculation of expected course duration

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When you browse courses on the web page, each course shows an expected duration. I’m assuming that this duration is calculated automatically based on the number of items. However, in some cases the expected duration seems rather unlikely to me.

For example, when you browse the Chinese Traditional courses at http://www.memrise.com/courses/english-us/chinese-traditional/, you can see that the HSK Complete course (http://www.memrise.com/course/266259/hsk-complete-traditional-characters/), which contains 5190 words, takes about 86 hours.

When you do the maths, that works out to be about 1 word per minute. Really? :cold_sweat: I don’t think I can learn that many words in such a short time, especially considering that this word list is supposed to take me from absolute beginner to near-native level - at least in word recognition ability. Is there any data to back up this calculation?

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this is not a “web bug”…

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Fair enough. My initial thought was “this calculation is wrong and therefore a bug”, but I suppose you could argue that it is simply my opinion that the calculation is too simplistic… :wink:

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I think it is only some rough guessing. And strictly speaking, this is about “course completion”, in other words, learning only. It’s obviously impossible to reach total recall in this time period.

I’ve come to the same conclusion as you did (even experimented a little with my own courses to see what happens with the guesstimate: it is one minute / entry. So to say, 10 seconds per repetition in the initial phase of learning a word.

In some cases it is accurate. In some cases it is grossly inaccurate. But it is something more tangible for a user than just saying how many words.

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People are taking these courses ALL the time… Why not simply show the average time spent by people that complete this?

I disagree if it’s completely inaccurate.

Considering the total possible time range it can take, the same would be true for practically any guessed time…

I agree with Robert on this; the time is grossly low. Any way you slice it, most people in the world will not learn a word a minute.

I think that this number is important, which is how I ended up here. I’ve been doing a course for over the time stipulated, and I’m not even half way.

It’s easy to use real world numbers for this and get an accurate value. Currently, I don’t think it adds value to the user.

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Let’s say you needed to see the word 20 times before you had passive knowledge of it (I was told on my teaching course the actual number was 17 times in 17 contexts), and memrise will make sure those 20 times are properly spaced out.It takes you longer than 5 seconds to type the words but less than 5 seconds to select them from multiple choice… so, you know, it isn’t THAT inaccurate.

I think you could passively learn 1 word per minute so. So long as it was broken into short, well spaced out intervals.

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