Honestly, course creation is extremely frustrating

Community-Created Courses Course Creator's Corner
1

I wasn’t going to make a thread about this but I’ve been spending far too much time solving puzzles in regards to creating courses and it’s quite frustrating and makes me want to just not bother using this site.

Here are my issues and process I must go through to import items…

  1. Every 100th item goes missing in bulk import. This is annoying but there is a workaround I posted in the other thread that makes this (slightly) less annoying. It simply involves adding “none1” into each column every 100th row.

  2. A limit of 1000 items added at a single time. So, using my method to get around the 100th missing item bug, my list of 1000 words [ which I think is a good course size ] is now 1010. This now means I have to import my list in two parts, thus also meaning I need to divide that list of 1010 words into two separate lists/spreadsheets because of the way the bug works. Now, there’s even more I have to do but I’ll get to that after the next issue.

  3. The archaic way the database and system uses multiple meanings. For Japanese this is very frustrating. I’ve had to go through my whole list of words and make sure I add a “.”, “…” or “…” after every duplicate word or kanji (and it’s meaning) so that the database recognizes it as a separate word. This then forces me to divide whatever lists I have into halves because I don’t want my Kanji columns to have random “.” after each of them when it’s the Kana that is a duplicate, vice versa etc.

  4. Now, I already have my 1000 words divided into two lists, then I have to divide each of those into 2 yet again because of what I just mentioned above. That is 4 separate spreadsheets (or lists) for 1000 words. Ugh…so 8 spreadsheets for 2000 words?

  5. Then once all of that is done and ready I go to import everything. I create two databases, one for Kana>English and another for Kanji>English, simple right? nope… think again. Another hurdle presents itself, I import the first batch of 500 items and discover a word is missing. Damn it, I am using word lists that are based on frequency so I need the words in order. And since I cannot re-order items in the database I now have to delete the database and create it again, go back to my word list and figure out which previous step I did incorrectly.

  6. Okay so now I have the 1000 words imported successfully. Yay! it’s a miracle. Now I have to go and do the same for the other thousands of words I want to add, keeping my fingers crossed that a new bug or mistake doesn’t arise that forces me to go back yet again and restart.

Ugh… am I the only one frustrated by this whole process? lol

3 Likes
2

And now there seems to be another issue with words moving from step A to step B. Sigh… I just have a simple list I want to learn , why can’t you let me fucking import it like any other site or software ? guess I’ll be using Anki from now on and perhaps Clozemaster.

4

There used to be an app called Uprise which I used all the time for bulk imports. It’d automatically generate audio and add it to the course as well. I say “used to be”, because one day it suddenly stopped functioning because Memrise had randomly changed some bullshit with their api and eunoia couldn’t recode it all over again. I’ve made extremely popular full-audio no-typing courses in Greek, Polish, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Dutch, and Danish (main name is Chromatica), and less well-known ones in Brazilian Spanish, Bulgarian, and Catalan, and I was working on one for Albanian, but after Uprise stopped working I completely lost all motivation to make new courses, because the web interface is just completely ridiculous.

1 Like
5

Well, this explains why my list of 1000 most common words ended up only being 990 when I imported it. I’ve also noticed that some fields don’t get copied over, or get replaced by things I didn’t put there when bulk adding from a spread sheet. For example, if I put “n, nom” in the part of speech column to indicate it’s a noun in nomative form, when importing, some keep it, some change to just “noun”, and some just have an empty field in that column. Another is half the gender fields being empty and not having the gender I had put in the spread sheet.