How do you decide which noun or German verb or verb combination you use?

Community-Created Courses German
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Often there are multiple correct answers to a question, where if you are in a tapping, listening or word selection section of review, you can easily determine which direction/noun/verb is required. But if you are in a typing question/quiz one’s Difficult Words are going to blow up.

Some of this is due to courses not being “clean”, not specifying which is required, but other times there are just multiple correct answers.

For German, common multiple correct answer nouns/adjectives are …

das Menu (Menü) vs die Speisekarte
der Doktor vs der Arzt
dick vs fett
Wie Spät ist es? vs Wie viel Uhr ist es?

So one has to really remember which course one is, and often the course creator’s preference.

But, then there are verbs & verb combinations & separable verbs too!

3 verbs that cause considerable confusion are möchten, haben & müssen - largely due to a very large sliding scale regarding what “have” means in English. 4 months into learning German, I couldn’t tell you when gern, bitte or gern & bitte is required with möchten in a sentence… and it appears to revolve around how many levels of politeness one wants to cover in a phrase; none, 1, 2 or 3.

wollen - to want to and will (English) are also very difficult due to ich will, er/sie/es will having a much different meaning that i will, he/she/it will

werden & gehen/(ab)fahren + a specified time (heute Abend, etc.)

There are more examples… countless. This isn’t meant to be a complaint, but this morning alone with about 200 words to review, about 50 “words” entered my Difficult Words list… not only did they add over 30 minutes to my initial review period, but now they will take at least an hour to clear.

Phrase memorization is not truly learning how to use and be able interact with a language, but in many regards this is what the above pushes, more particularly in phrases/sentences learning in both Memrise & Duo.

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Do you have any suggestions for how these problems could be solved?

I encountered these problems when I started learning Swedish here on memrise, but later became a course contributor and slowly but surely started finding ways to get around these problems.

So, there are solutions to these problems, but I think it takes a dedicated long-time memrise user to come up with some of the answers :wink:

You are new, it seems, and are at the stage of identifying problems, but not yet experienced enough to recognise the work that goes into creating a course or the impossibility of knowing in advance what kind of problems might occur.

Creating a course can be a LOT of work and we should be grateful to the people who do so and take the time to do so - whether they are memrise team members or “just” members of the “memrise community” - and not just moan and not offer any solutions.

Admittedly, the current set-up here is not ideal: when I first began using memrise just over three years ago, it was still possible to access the forums directly as you learnt or reviewed words and this was how I was given course-contributor status: I made so many suggestions that the course creator in question suggested I just go ahead and make them myself :slight_smile:

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From my experience of living in Germany for almost three decades (and being a teacher of English for the same amount of time), being fluent in a language is most definitely partially about knowing the right phrase for the right situation. You will sound more “native-like” and be more easily understood by the locals if you learn the common “lexical chunks” used in a language, rather than laboriously translating phrases word for word from your own language.

Just sayin’ :smiley:

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Here are some suggestions for this problem:

  1. der Doktor (loan word); der Arzt (not a loan word);

  2. dick vs. fett - give examples where only ONE of these words is appropriate, e.g. “ich mag kein fettes Essen” - I don’t like fatty food;
    “dieser Pulli ist zu dick” - this pullover is too warm.

I do this on the 8K+ Swedish courses like this: "[ich mag kein ~es Essen]. This example would be added to the definition.

Both words “dick” and “fett” are used to describe overweight people, but they have lots of other uses and meanings, too. It isn’t too difficult to find examples if you use the internet and good online dictionaries.

“Wie viel Uhr ist es?” (not: “wie spät ist es?”)

I have seen some course creators use a convention whereby they give the initial letters of a phrase, but I personally find this “too helpful” :slight_smile:

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Most of these issues are coming from the Heuber Menschen A1 course which is comes directly from the course book which is a primary (highly used) book in actual immersion course.

Now owning several of these course books, it’s pretty clear each course chooses its own ‘most important’ words.

Speaking of which, that was my primary reason for giving Memrise a try… it was sort of sold on being sourced from some analytics of most used words.

Now having investing much time in both official & unofficial courses, I’m kind of doubting how much this is true. :confounded:

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Indeed, what you have said about memrise isn’t true and I don’t know where you got this information from :frowning: But memrise isn’t to blame for your having misunderstood what the company offers or doesn’t offer.

What memrise does for you - regardless of whether you use community-created courses or the “official” ones created by the memrise team - is that it has spaced-repetition software (SRS) - as do other language learning apps - which will help you monitor and track your progress.

What is special about memrise’s community-created courses - and I hope this will remain so - is that you can make visual or text “mems” to help you learn new information even more thoroughly. This is something that the other companies do not offer.

The new memrise-created courses offered on the app offer some other cool features, too, but I haven’t tested them thoroughly.

I do not recall ever reading that memrise "was sort of sold on being sourced from some analytics of most used words."

This way of learning is also in its infancy and it is clear that it is going to have teething troubles. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water! :slight_smile:

I have managed to learn around 10,000 words of Swedish using memrise and have gone from a complete beginner to being able to read Swedish fiction and listen to Swedish audio books, following about 80% of the content for the most part. This has happened over the course of three years.

While it is true that memrise hasn’t been the only string to my bow, it has been one of the most important. Don’t diss something you don’t fully understand and give it a bit more time!

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I am not dissing Memrise. I actually purchased a subscription to support the platform, more so than having an expectation that something that is free (or that I am not willing to pay for) should be “perfect” for me.

It is highly useful, however… and maybe this is a suggestion to Memrise itself, I feel they need to pull back some on the open sourcing/open creation of course, if as you have noted elsewhere they are only a small group (small company) that cannot/should not be expected to verify/confirm/authanicate every course created.

To this end… again maybe a suggestion, that they consider a universal word database for each language. As it stands currently, in for example 6 courses I am doing… 30-50% of the words are repeated, however the quality of each is not maintain uniformly throughout all course. For example, in course A the correct answer is “der Mann”, in course B “Mann” in course C “Der Mann”, etc.

Then as I have noted elsewhere, there are courses where the audio is wrong for words… or in one Seriously = wirklich, another = ernst, another “Seriously?”

I appreciate all the time people have put into these course, but it is also true this forum is not universally known by those who have both created courses, as well as those that are just using the courses themselves.

I really don’t know the answers. But what I do know is that I am currently working through 3 different 1st & 2nd generation courses (aka 6 different courses for 3) only because I found the 1st generation course before finding the 2nd (new & improved versions)… and one might even say 3rd & 4th generation course if they were orginally Duolingo course adapted for Memrise.

At this point in time I can’t tell you how many repititions I have done for a simple word like der Junge… 100s, which then reminds me…

Words used in sentences, don’t count towards learning that word itself… for example, Ich bin ein Junge. Then Du bist ein Junge. Add all those in, maybe I’ve repeated Junge 1000 times now. :smiley:

Oh well… it is what it is

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Incidently, Menü is not the same as Speisekarte, even though many native speakers use it that way in more recent years, as a false friend from english. (And because computer menus tend to get translated that way, erroneously. And while we’re at it, a tile is eine Fliese, not a Kachel, which is what you build a tiled stove with.)
Menü properly only means “set menu”.

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You can use the “ignore” button for words that you have encountered in other courses. That is pretty easy to do. There is no actual need to repeat words that you are learning on multiple courses.

In order to avoid - or at least minimize - the problem with different courses asking for different answers for the same things, I try to focus on one course at a time.

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or “set meal” could be used for “das Menü”.

or “dish of the day” could be used for “das Tagesmenü”.

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to your point I have seen one course use the following… menu (not Speisekarte) and then menu (not Menu). Some of the needed course edits I am thinking about would likely follow this convention where there are multiple translations for the same word.

While I have see another use cafe and only accept cafe(with the ’ over the e) which is not even on a German keyboard

and yet others have for Club - Disko, Disco or Club.

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There is actually an entire thread on the “ignore” feature. The gist being, ignore removes it completely from the timed repetition algorithms which is Memrise’s primary underlying benefit.

Many solutions were offered, some suggesting Memrise should be smarter and recognize the time one requires to provide the correct answer then automatically takes it out of the initial 6 repeat sequence if one answers very quickly.

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I have a German keyboard right in front of me (a Chromebook, so maybe not 100% standard, but still) and I have no trouble writing café or touché or whatévér :slight_smile:

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But if you know the word, why does this matter? Especially if I still have the word on another course?

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I have a German keyboard as well on my iPad… and I can type it as so … é which is actually done by first pressing the e and then the + sign, which gives the ’ which then “magically” moves over the e… é

However, in the course (again the Huber Menschen A1) I referenced above, this did not work “magically” or not.

But this is getting into the details, which is not my point.

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Do I know the word, or do I know the word only because I have had to repeat it 50 times in the last day, only to forget it 5 or 10 days later when it would otherwise come up in the algorithm but does not because it has been marked ignore?

I feel like we are looking at the trees without seeing the forest at this point.

I don’t know about Swedisch, but German also has the articles to deal with… so one isn’t learning only 1 word, but 2 for every noun.

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Well, you just have to use your best judgement, don’t you? If you later think, “Oh, I seem to have forgotten that word after all”, you can just “un-ignore” it.

You seem to be finding problems where there aren’t any, IMHO.

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sorry, but Doktor existed in German for centuries… it comes from Latin of course, but almot 25% of the German vocabulary is in fact Latin in origin… lets count it differently …Doktor is un fact an academic title and not the denomination of a profession, yes? taking into account how old the oldest German university is, would you still say it is a loan word?

btw, all world knowing that the German PhD in medicine is worth exactly 0
btw 2, the true synonym for “Arzt” is “Mediziner”

(it is made during the undergraduate studies!!! and has the difficulty and length of a “Referat”; patients allegedly do wish to be treated only by a “Doktor” (at least this is what the Bundesärztekammer claims is the use and utility of the Dr for medical doctors… Gedanken schweifen… Italians have their own ideas about “dottore” … dottoore dottoooree vaffanc*** sorry memories of Padova …)

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@Hydroptere

I take your point, but I am just trying to find a way to get around the horrible synonym problem here …

“der Arzt” is a very German word, whereas “der Doktor” is a cognate that anybody who speaks English will recognize.

And just because a word has been around for centuries, doesn’t mean it isn’t a loan word :wink:

To be pedantic, even “der Arzt” and “der Mediziner” are not synonyms. You can say “der Tierarzt” and “der Zahnarzt”, but nobody says (I know the words may exist, but in spoken German, I imagine they are very rarely said):

  • “Ich bringe die Katze jetzt zum Tiermediziner! So geht es nicht weiter!”

or:

  • “Mein Zahnmediziner hat mir gesagt, dass ich …”

Oder??? :wink:

I have a bit of a thing about the concept of “synonyms” in languages, as you can see :slight_smile:

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Now you are getting into the leaves, not even the tree amongst the forest.

In the 10 or more courses I have used, one one chose to use Doctor over Arzt.

As you mention you have a thing for synonyms, how is it you suggest the courses to differential the required answer if as I you say I am making a problem out of nothing? I have a solution for it, everytime one comes up I just hit the magic button repeatedly until is spells it out. Then I don’t have to waste my time clearing it from the Difficult Words list, which it is not actually one of, but rather a “problem” with the course.

Of course I cannot do that when the audio button turns red & I have to guess, or the audio is wrong. But who’s keeping track?