I am a course contributor for various Swedish courses and in the big courses, the issue of synonyms often crops up. How do you deal with them in your courses?
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In the question part I usually write for example (not q…) to signal that I want a word that doesn’t begin with a certain letter.
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There’s great explanation of this in the old forum, but since that’s going to be shut down I’ll write it up again here. I do this in one of my courses and keep thinking of adding it someday to some of the courses I maintain that were created by others a long time ago.
Add a third column, titled “synonym” or “other meaning”, depending on your testing direction. Make it a regular column, not an attribute, but don’t use it as the “test on” or “prompt with” column.
If someone is reviewing and types, as an answer, the value that’s in the third column, memrise will tell them “Sorry, you typed the synonym when we wanted the [column name]. Try again.” Column name would be the “test on” column - the one that has the answer the user is supposed to enter. They’re not marked wrong or right, they just have to answer the same review item again.
For example, in my course http://www.memrise.com/course/702355/hebrew-reading-and-language-intro/8/ on one of the early levels it teaches you the word שָלď‹×ť twice - once as “peace” (noun) and once as “hello/goobye” (greeting). I want people to learn both uses of the word, so these are two separate rows in the database and two separate items on that level.
My columns are Hebrew, English, and Other Meaning, so for these two rows:
Row A: Hebrew = “שָלď‹×ťâ€ť; English = “peace”; Other Meaning = “hello”,"goodbye"
Row B: Hebrew = “שָלď‹×ťâ€ť; English = “hello”,“goodbye”; Other meaning = “peace”
All levels are configured to “prompt with” Hebrew and “test on” English, because this is a course where you learn to read and understand Hebrew, not to type Hebrew. So let’s say you’re being reviewed and get the שָלď‹×ť from Row B, and you type “peace”. Memrise will say “Sorry, you typed the Other Meaning when we wanted the English. Try again.” The user gets another chance to answer, and now they’ll know this item is the one for hello/goodbye and type one of those.
Some clarifications and other considerations, all of which I hinted at above:
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Attributes, like part of speech, to give hints. For example, in my course, when people see שָלď‹×ť they will also see in small print below it the attribute that says “noun” or “greeting”. Which means in this case they don’t actually need the Other Meanings feature to figure out which meaning they’re being prompted for. But a) sometimes synonyms are the same part of speech, and attributes won’t always help disambiguate, and b) people very often see the word and think of the answer quickly before they notice the attribute.
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If my testing direction were “prompt with” English, “test on” Hebrew, then my third column would’ve been named Synonyms. Think about which direction your course is testing, and under what circumstances people might enter your third-column value, and you’ll see which name makes the most sense. How you name the third column doesn’t affect how this feature works at all, it only matters for what shows up in that message memrise gives when someone types one of those answers. Would it make more sense for your users to see “sorry, you typed the other meaning”, or “sorry, you typed the synonym”? Or something else. You decide.
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Since it’s a real column, not an attribute, it can have alts! It can also use the memrise comma list feature. That’s why I can set a value of “hello, goodbye” and memrise will accept either hello or goodbye as a valid answer. You can mix and match, and have a comma separated list and add alts to the same column. Just like your two main columns.
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1, if the course is no typing: I add synonyms in a separate column, which column is marked as either “always visible”, or as “show after”. The user always gets to see the synonyms
2 typing: a - add as much synonyms as possible 2. use disambiguation of the sort mentioned before: first lewtter(s) of the specific item(s) in brackets after the English/German definition
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Thanks for the replies, guys!
Personally, I don’t like offering synonyms or alternatives, because that can mean that I simply don’t learn a particular word if every time it crops up in reviewing I can just write a different word and it is accepted.
In the 3K Swedish course by sehiralti, a word for “appear” crops up really early on in the course - it is a frequency course, by the way, so this word must be pretty common in Swedish - but several synonyms were accepted. It was only recently that I realized that I had hardly ever given the correct answer and had almost forgotten that this word even existed!
As a result, I am going through the courses I am course contributor for and weeding out false synonyms and simply writing in brackets after the requested word “not: XXXX” so that people will be forced to come up with only the word requested.
The other problem with “synonyms” is that there really are very few words that can be classified as true synonyms, but that is maybe a topic for another thread 
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@amanda-norrsken I use “not…” Simple and can be done at any time by just updating the words in question in your database.
For example:
noleggiare => (to) hire (not affittare)
affittare => (to) rent (not noleggiare)
Of course, this works well when strict testing is not enforced otherwise, the learner needs to type the whole thing, which is not very friendly. 
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That is exactly what the third column method I suggested takes care of. You cannot get by by simply giving the other synonym - you have to try again if you do that, until you either enter a wrong answer or the right answer for this one. That takes care of the problem you’re describing.
I’ve noticed this in a few courses recently, but it has a very big drawback: It gives me a big hint for a word that might be up for review soon. I can’t avoid seeing it! So when that word comes up soon after, I don’t get it wrong, unless I decided to get it wrong deliberately, but I don’t do that because I don’t know that I forgot it. But maybe I did forget it? How can I tell, when I just saw it in the “not: xxx” text?
So I really wish courses didn’t do that.
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In my courses, the words usually are quite a few levels apart so the chances of you getting them together in a test is rather slim…
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Interesting point, cos!
To be honest, in some cases, the option of “not: X” is one that I have used when I have come across “synonyms” that I know need to be defined more accurately - “disambiguated” is the term that is used, I believe - but I haven’t yet got around to revising the definitions, so this is just a stop-gap measure till I find time to look into the words in question.
Usually, once I have researched a couple of words that are used in similar ways, I find out that there are quite significant differences in some aspects and then it becomes clear that words which were presented as “synonyms” are not really synonyms at all.
I have been learning words on courses containing 3,000 words, 1,500 words and so on. I have been working on these courses for about two years and it has happened very regularly that very similar words have appeared together in review sessions.
Even if they’re several levels apart, the chances that I’d get them close together in review is still pretty high, because there’s a good correlation a lot of the time between having trouble remembering one half of a synonym pair and having trouble with the other half. Not always, but reasonably often. And of course if I have trouble remembering both of them, I’ll get them wrong more often, at least on the first few reviews, so they get scheduled more frequently - even the one I learned longer ago.
I’ve definitely had this happen already a few times in courses that use the “not XXX” hint strategy.
Yes, I’ve seen this a lot on the Finnish courses I co-maintain. When I have time to look through my really nice Finnish dictionary, I often figure out that some of the synonyms really aren’t, and I can make clearer definitions that will clarify which word people should enter. However, sometimes words really do have significant overlap in meaning, and having synonyms is still called for.
Keep in mind that people are often taking multiple vocab courses in the same language, courses maintained by different people. Even if you’ve found a really clever way to disambiguate two words whose meaning overlaps a lot, such that people who know your course could figure out which is which, people might be learning the same words in other courses with subtly different disambiguations in their definitions - some of which may partly match and partly mismatch what your definitions say. It can get really confusing to have to try to remember which course wants what. So if the disambiguation is subtle and the meaning still has a lot in common, I think synonyms are a good thing.
Of course, if you have the time to do it, or you’re creating a new course, using a third column for synonyms avoids the problem of people only learning one and never the other. That plus careful disambiguation, is the best way to do it.
@cos, I recently thought of this approach too, but I didn’t test it. It’s interesting that someone else is using this method 
One question that I had and maybe you can answer is this: does this keep two correct answers from showing up during multiple choice questions?
For instance, if I have the Chinese character 好 and in the same level I have one definition where 好’s definition is “good” and its synonym is “very” and I have another definition where 好’s definition is “very” and its synonym is “good”, when I have a multiple choice question prompting with 好, is it possible for both “good” and “very” to show up as answers?
It is possible (and very frustrating), however, with recent changes to the multiple choice, where answers to choose from are similar, it is unlikely.
I ran into the “synonym problem” a lot on Spanish courses such as Eunoia’s “pills”, the 5000 most frequent words list, etc. Therefore, I decided to make my new course based on Spanish that I’ve actually seen in my life:
I try to deal with the issue by including a hint in the English definition such as “(starts with tr)”.
Depends on what you mean by “correct”.
If you mean answers that memrise will accept as correct, then yes, only one correct answer will appear in a multiple choice question.
If you mean answers that are correct in the general sense - the actual answer and the synonym - then I don’t know. I’ve never seen it but I can’t tell you for sure.
In the context of your example, I do not know if both “good” and “very” might show up as answers on the same multiple choice question. I’ve never seen that happen but that might just be luck. However, if they did both show up, I assume that one of them would be marked correct, and the other would give you the synonym warning and ask you to try again. Based on that, I assume memrise programmed the system to make that never happen - but you never know.
Are you sure you saw answers coming from a third column ? Or did you just run into that memrise bug where it sometimes duplicates answers, or were you on a course that puts its synonyms in alts?
I meant that information from second column of a duplicate word from the first column (i.e. same word, but different definitions as separate items) can show up in multiple choice. In such situation getting the correct answer is pure luck, because only the one that “system means” will be accepted.
Oh, okay, I think that’s one of the problems you can solve by putting synonyms/other meanings in a third column. I’m not sure, but I think so.
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That works well I’ve found. My cocurators agree.
I’m not a favour of the “not XXX” for that reason, but until yesterday when I realised you could do the “synonym” column trick that was the only fallback I could think of, so I’d use it in emergencies only, and make sure it was only ever “not X…” where X is just the first letter.
But e.g. for German, both “Bedarf” and “Bedürfnis” are largely synonymous, and even if you say “not Beda…” you’ve basically given away the actual wanted word. The extra column trick is definitely the way to go.
BTW for me the most annoying thing with synonyms is when reviewing across multiple courses. If I know what course I’m reviewing I can usually remember which words are needed for which English prompts. But when I get random words from random courses with no clue as to which course a word is from it’s almost impossible to get right when you know different courses accept different German words for the same English prompt.
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