Inappropriate reference in OFFICIAL course

I checked. I don’t see the condoms thing in Spanish.

You don’t deserve to go? I don’t think I agree with that at all. People have their own purposes to travel.

Checked again, it’s level 1 stage 3

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Oh. I was checking the Latin American one.

Yeah they should remove the condoms thing too.

You can flag posts and mems as inappropriate but not official courses. Hypocrisy.

I would block the sentence with “hentai” in it but since it’s a grammar lesson it’s unblockable.

Next time please post one topic only. I’ll invite @Joshua and @MemriseMatty to see what they think.
ML

There’s another thread about this now at the moment actually, is this one of the courses they changed for the new year?

Hi @garrisonmorton,

Thank you for flagging this and I’m sorry it disturbed some people’s feelings.
It’s it now removed from the course, so if you log and log in again you should see it clean now:)

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Personally, I don’t see anything remotely offensive about the word “condom”.

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@MemriseMatty @KanaTsumoto @Joshua @MemriseSupport

As always, you can not please all users on the same level.

If you have any doubts, introduce a “mature words” feature like Duolingo offers it for school classrooms; a teacher can deactivate some words like alcohol, wine, beer, etc. (AFAIK there are bugs and it does not really work that great - still showing some words which younger kids should probably not see).

Isn’t your web portal (or mobile app) asking for a birthday or age when a user registers on your server?

You (your backend code) should have a clear idea what category a learner falls into (adult, teen, young kid), don’t you?

Why don’t you have your algorithm hide some words when the account holder does not have the minimum age?

It is somehow ridiculous having to remove several words of courses for adults.

What comes next?
Removing all user-created “Dirty / slang word/phrases” courses from your web portal?
Please don’t do that.
If your team internally considers doing so, please just split courses into 2-3 age categories and when an account owner is allowed to view the courses or words

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What about ‘hentai’?
How does that have any real world application?

I have to agree with Matt here. Language is language, as long as the course is aiming to teach, even if it has naughty words, I’d say leave it alone. If a course is going out of its way to offend people, without any academic value, that’s where I’d be for getting rid of it. And @MemriseMatty, would you mind looking at my DM to you? It’s important.

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While I sort of agree the word hentai should be removed from the main course, let’s not pretend kids have no clue of what a hentai or a condom actually is. Unless that kid is younger than 11-12 (and I highly doubt 10- year-olds are interested in languages), they’ve most definitely heard vulgarities at least once in their lifetime and after that, googling them is just a matter of time. Also, how far are we willing to censor a course just to “please our precious kids”? Some could very well argue that the words wine and kill are offensive, though they have practical use and you’re expected to know them if you’re fluent.

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The Portuguese BR 1-7 course series (can’t exactly remember which one) for example shows me words like drugs, alcohol, beer, wine, war, soldiers, murder, killer, thief, stolen, arrested, etc. (there are more, just some which I am aware of).

If I turn the radio or TV on “real life” somewhere in the world is not any different than getting taught some of those words which do not break down the world to me as an adult.

It may be more difficult to decide on a case-by-case basis where to draw the line exactly…

Please Memrise, don’t even consider this. It only complicates the website and they are enough bugs already that really need fixing. Like the phantom database entries problem.


Duolingo recently introduced censoring of certain English words on the forums. Which is - apart from being ridiculous - really impractical on a language site. It now hides innocuous and very common words like black in Spanish (negro) and how in Dutch (hoe) under heart symbols.

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excuse me, but why did you remove them??? I am learning _Japanese and I want to know these words… Removing these words hurts my feelings, so please take my feelings as well into consideration.

to the originator of the thread: why are you shouting around?

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The old lesson 8 is still “there” (the one that had the word) but it’s unusable. It’s a bug I think.

The word hentai still appears in a different part of the course. Another grammar lesson. It sometimes appears when I do grammar reviews.

(I know a kid who’s learning Japanese and I’d have trouble recommending Memrise to a kid if this word is in there and unblockable)

Ok. My opinion, why remove it just so a minority may think it’s not needed. It may not be the best of words but earning a language is about learning all it’s words it has to offer, dirty or not. Just ignore that word and move on. Just I really think that we shouldn’t go over all this trouble to remove a word that one person wants to remove… :confused:

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Hi All,

This is a word that has a different meaning in Japanese and English (, which shamefully I only noticed from this message,) but the English definition I feel is too strong. Even though this is a Japanese course, as long as there is no good place in the app I can explain the actual use of the Japanese word, I decided it is not worth having that word in the course.
I do feel sad that the English definition has taken over the identity of this word, but you can never regulate natural languages, so that’s that.

With the issue that you still see both old and new levels, that is a bug so I will look into it. You do have to log out and log in again to see changes usually. I’m assuming everyone has done that.

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Forget about being inappropriate or not.It does not belong to an introductory course.