Users who create courses expend a lot of effort, for which I am grateful. However, they occasionally make mistakes in spelling or formatting. As a learner, as well as remembering the vocabulary, I have to remember the error if I am to convince the system that I have learned the word.
Not to single out this one course, but it’s the one I am working through at present: the 2200 Essential Vocabulary in Japanese.
Oniisan is the word for older brother. Oneesan is the word for older sister, but the course has it as “O neesan” and you need to type the space to get it correct.
Kaigi is the word for conference but, unusually for this course, the word is given in hiragana rather than English. Therefore this question and others like it are actually a test of reading rather than comprehension (you could get it right every time without knowing what kaigi means).
Many words in this course are given in English/Japanese format, so the user can answer with either the romaji or Japanese spelling. However, some answers accidentally omit the ‘/’, so the response is only marked as correct when you type both words together as if they were one word.
With such a large course, errors like these are perhaps inevitable. Therefore, if users had the ability to mark a question as problematic, the course creator could be alerted to fix it. Alternatively, the user could be given the option to fix the question. This fix could remain in place for the user only, so it didn’t affect anyone else (if the fix itself happened to be an error), or be submitted for the consideration of the creator.
It’s frustrating to encounter these errors and it’s one of the main things that turns me off a course. It’s difficult enough to learn a language without having to navigate the errors too. Plus it is a shame to identify an error and know that it is very unlikely to be fixed, and will bother many 1000s of other learners in turn.
OK, but I got here by clicking a link on the main feedback page. And this isn’t about any one course, although my examples are drawn from one course.
Also:
you are a very new user, aren’t you?
Check your tone, please. That’s not a friendly way to greet a noob. I know it’s frustrating when new people don’t know the rules, but there you go: new people will tend to show up from time to time on a forum.
Yes, course forums are good. But a ‘problem’ button next to the ignore and ‘difficult’ button would help (I think about the app). The course creator gets automatic a message - it’s much more direct and also people who don’t visit the forum would give feedback.
what exactly is upsetting you in my question??? or are you just looking for a fight? (a not so new user would have navigated a bit the fora until now, and would not be so “arrogant” in his / “feature” suggestion)
don’t bother with other “how do you dare” posts, i’ve muted you as a user
I agree with the original feature request – it would be much more useful being able to provide feedback from exactly the page where the problem occurs, with the memrise software giving automatically the full information of what is shown to the user to the course developer.
For example, one problem I saw with one course (Farsi) is that a multiple-choice answer apparently used random alternate picks in addition to the right answer. However, some of the alternate picks are also correct (in the Farsi alphabet, the same letter e.g. “sin” can get written in several different ways). This means that picking a correct answer can still make memrise consider it incorrect which is very frustrating.
If Memrise would just allow a short note plus the information shown to the user to get sent to the course developer, this may simplifying adapting the course a lot.
I study a German 5000 words course an I know for a fact that one word has the audio of an entirelly different word. Whenever it appears i may be too “in the zone” to stop and note it, and it wouldn’t be of much use if i don’t find in which of the 300+ lessons it’s contained to report it. I totally agree mistake and alternate (correct) answering could and should meet improvement with just a few very simple added features.
DuoLingo does it and therefore more reports are sent in.
Mondly does not exactly do it that way (just a generic report button + textfield, but missing the exact question and translations) and it is way more difficult to report.
I totally agree with Umbillical: The course forums are not that good - they are 1-2 clicks away…
You can still use them in parallel for not that easy errors…but adding synonyms and minor stuff could get added better / easier with the report/feedback and a “reports pending queue”.
Just had several instances in a course where in a multiple choice selection of answers, the same answers were present twice, but only one of them was accepted as correct. So one had a 50-50 chance of getting the right right answer. I have no idea how that can happen, but I am pretty sure that a course developer would be motivated to do something about it when they get direct feedback of this with the exact page shown to the user included. To describe this is hard, to know what exactly was on the page is even harder to do even a few minutes after. I would not really know how to give feedback to the course developer about this.
Also Persian/Farsi is not even in the list of languages, either on the web page or in the language drop down menu, so no idea where the proper forum would be
It can happen if two words have the same translation,
For example, learning English:
foreign word for ship -> ship
foreign word for boat (because there is not distinction between boat and ship in this language) -> ship
In this case memrise isn’t so clever that both foreign words are connected with ship, and if it teaching the first entry, the second as an answer on ‘ship’ is marked wrong. The course creator should created alternatives, but didn’t do so. You asked how it can happen - that is how it can happen.
