Looking for Advice: Concerning Importing Mems in Course Creation

[TinyCaterpillar]

Hello, everyone.

Due to recent changes to how the searches work in course creation, I’ve found myself stumped on how to proceed in creating the courses that I’ve been accumulating material for.

I’ve always placed a high priority on importing mems into my courses wherever I can, and to that end, I’ve run a search through the wiki for each individual entry, to see if there’s anything to import, rather than using the ‘Bulk Add’ option, which doesn’t catch every match.

However, something got messed up on Memrise’s end about a month and a half ago, and the searches no longer seem to work correctly. I build Japanese courses, and whenever I try to search by kana or kanji, I rarely see any remotely relevant results, whereas it was more often than not spot on before. The English search seems to be the only one that works for me, but that is unfortunately next to useless to me, as the definitions vary wildly for most words, and my chances of finding a match with that within a reasonable time frame is slim to none.

I tried getting in touch with Memrise’s support on this over a month ago, but long story short, absolutely no progress seems to have been made in that time. So, I’m now looking for advice from the community instead. Is anyone else facing this issue in their course creation? How to you handle it? Is there some trick that I’m missing to get the search to behave correctly? Maybe I’m in the minority on feeling that importing mems is important?

As I said, I’m thoroughly stumped on this. So any opinions would be greatly welcomed. Thanks.

[TinyCaterpillar]

A couple of examples:

Searching for おとな / 大人:

Searching for だいく / 大工 (a word that I am sure I had successfully imported into one of my courses prior to the issues):

And finally, a search for “carpenter” in the English field. Note that it returns a result that both previous searches should have found:

[Arete_Hime (Ultra-Sadist Delinquent)]

any opinions would be greatly welcomed

Any opinions? A completely unreasonable approach I would then perhaps try if I were faced with this problem, would be to download a bunch of courses that use the default wiki, using import.io (which is supposedly able to download thousands of items quickly), search for your words in that, and use the English definition to search Memrise… Or perhaps the wiki is archived somewhere and you could download that.

Equally unreasonable, you could ask Memrise to give you access to the database or let you download it, or try to figure out or ask what source they used.

Edit: found this old discussion where @ikenaiAndi talks about contributing to the Japanese - German wiki. Maybe they know a bit more about the Japanese - English one as well.

https://web.archive.org/web//http://www.memrise.com/wikis/

[TinyCaterpillar]

Thanks for the ideas. I can’t say that those crossed my mind, and yes, at this point, I’ll take anything, because I’m at a complete loss.

I’d be open to referencing the other courses, but a problem with that is that from my experience, it worked to import an entry, then change the English field, so they wouldn’t necessarily match up.

I may try asking Memrise about downloading the database. After being led around for a month on what I thought to be a simple issue, I’m not expecting much, but it could be worth a shot.

I’ll check out the forum link when I’ve got a bit more time. Thanks for posting it.

Have you been building any courses in the past month? Could I ask what your approach has been on adding new entries? I’m very interested to know whether this issue is affecting other users or not.

[ikenaiAndi]

I was moderator for Japanese-German and English when there was still a big shared wiki during beta, but much has changed now and courses have their own ones now. Which is okay for me, I stopped doing open courses years ago and only use memrise for myself now, with my own stuff.
I’ve recently started working on something bigger and the only things I can find in my wiki are my own entries.

[migarisa]

I’m building a Japanese course right now and have been facing the same problem. I’ve noticed the English column works, the kanji column will only search for words that start with the first kanji you input and the kana is almost useless. So I’m currently putting the first kanji of a given word in the kanji column and then I try to put something in the other columns to see if my word pops up.

Example: For 大人:

Not very elegant and doesn’t always work, but until Memrise staff can fix the bug, it’s all we can do. It’s probably not gonna be fixed while they’re touring through Europe on the Membus so just try to be patient

[TinyCaterpillar]

Thanks for the response, @migarisa. I’ve recently been attempting to build courses again, and I noticed that I seem to get different results when I input in multiple fields. So I’ve been basically just trying different combinations and seeing what I can get, which has been a clumsy and time-consuming way to go about it, but at least I’ve been able to import mems again.

I’ll give your approach a try. It’d certainly be nice to cut down on the time that the process takes. Thanks for the suggestion!

And yes, I’ll try to be patient. I’ve already waited two months, so I guess I can wait a bit more.

[migarisa]

You’re welcome! Like I say, it doesn’t always work. Single-kanji words almost never get recognized, but most compounds do