Just in hopes of it being helpful information, I haven’t been encountering the issue with answers bleeding into the next test myself at all. I’m using the Google IME with Firefox.
In any case, I really hope you’ll consider making this optional, Memrise… As many have already said here, learning is much too personal a thing for such a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Would it really be so much effort to just add an option to the (barely used) settings page? Alienating large numbers of your users really doesn’t seem like a good business decision, when the solution would be so simple. No one would have any complaints about things like this if they could choose themselves whether to use it or not. I couldn’t care less what the default is, if I can just turn it off when I want to.
darn, did not notice that when toying (but I have no intention to ever use the app)
to convey further the old idea of “rat labs of memrise”: given the web-population is much smaller, we’re suitable for sort of milgram experiments: “let the idiots get white hair because of our fix ideas about how one should “learn” (or game?), let’s see how their learning curve goes down, and down”…
Thanks @widle, I didn’t know that. I have the iOS version of the app and don’t see it in the settings there, although I have now spotted it in the Android app section of the Help/FAQ area on the website. Don’t know why they are different but agree that there seems no reason not to have it as a toggle on the web version.
@Hydroptere -maybe that explains why you didn’t see it either?
Do you think that Memrise meassures anything about their users (e.g web behavior, learning, reviews, comparing to results of mobile apps, etc.) and even analyses that like it is being said about DuoLingo metrics and A/B tests?
huh? of course! how do you think the statistics for the pro mode are made?
some couple of weeks ago didn’t they say “we will make reviews etc more individualised (???), according to each learning experience” or something… look into the msg of lukemorphy or … I don’t really remember
I like the auto-accept for one reason: sometimes a prompt will have multiple valid translations but with identical English clues, and only one valid translation is accepted. Without auto-accept, I end up drilling words I already know, and know very well, over and over because I have to guess which correct answer it wants. It’s a total waste of time to go over these words every few days when I know them so well.
So if the negative feedback is making you consider removing auto-accept, please leave it as an option, because it seems that every course I am doing has this problem.
We don’t have to speculate about how much they monitor, because they have stated it themselves.
Their CTO, Daniel Zohar, gave a talk at a conference for Snowplow, which is their back-end analytics system. At the talk, he said that Memrise has a “monitor everything mentality,” and explained that everyone at the company has access to an analytics dashboard, which shows what users are doing in real time, and they can see immediate results for new courses and A/B tests, etc. He even said that if they release a new version and break something, their analytics system will detect the anomaly and alert the staff, and if the problem is serious, phone calls get made.
What strikes me most is the contrast of how interested he claims that Memrise is in knowing immediately what impact their changes to the site have on their users’ experience, and the reality of how they continually ignore virtually everything we post here on the forums about those same changes when they malfunction or disrupt our ability to use the site.
Well, I’ve made the switch to Anki. Pretty sure I won’t be back. Well done Memrise, special mention for @BeaTrisy for dropping that steaming pile before ignoring all the feedback.
every course you take has this problem? and you already know so many synonyms, you use memrise for things that you already know? then you should probably take higher level courses?
I would like to point out another problem with this change, and it is something I pointed out the last time around. If Memrise cares about accurate measurement of learning via counting correct responses, you should take into account the now multiple times I have, and I’m sure others have, accidentally hit the wrong multiple-choice response after hitting the enter key for the previous (typing) question. This means the user is getting “wrong” answers where he/she did indeed know the right answer but didn’t have a chance to select it, and now that term/phrase comes up more frequently than it should in testing. It’s annoying. Memrise needs to change back to the previous state of no auto-accept, or give the user the option of declining the feature. Please.
Another interesting point here: again, “if Memrise cares about accurate measurement of learning via counting correct responses”, it will look like we became extremely good learners, since we can try and fail many times before the auto-accept validates whatever the right answer is (and again, maybe I just guessed that answer after many fails.)
I can just try die, der and das Haus, and I get it right even if I didn’t know at all what the answer was. So basically, I DO NOT LEARN ANYTHING, and Memrise will analyse the absolute contrary.
So, how will you manage to make me learn better then, I really do not get it. Of course, this is only if Memrise still has the ambition to be a learning tool. Has it?
The auto accept is ridiculous. If I’m answering a date question, I can try multiple times until I get the answer right, and I learn NOTHING.
The virtual keyboard actively reduces learning. For example, if I’m doing ear training, and I see a “5” in the virtual keyboard, you’ve just told me that the interval is a Perfect 5th, and I learn NOTHING.
Well, every course might be an exaggeration, but yeah, a lot of them. As for knowing multiple synonyms, there’s a couple things going on:
Sometimes it’s within a single course, where they will have multiple synonyms with the same English prompt, but for each one only one answer is accepted.
Sometimes it’s because I’m taking multiple courses in the same language, and each course has a different word that it will accept as an answer.
These are courses of thousands of vocabulary words, so it’s not a matter of taking higher level courses. Because I have to guess when they come up, I sometimes (often?) guess incorrectly, and then of course it comes up more frequently.
What’s best is when two or more synonyms for the same word come up in the same couple of days, and I end up guessing them both incorrectly, and now both of them come up frequently, so I have to just settle on always answering the same answer, which causes one of the synonyms (the one I settle on always entering) to become less frequent in the rotation but the other(s) to still come up all the time. Then after the one I was getting right seems to go away (because I’ve gotten it right enough times), I can switch to answering one of the other synonyms until it too seems to go away. But then, weeks, later, it starts all over again when they start to show up again.
If you have a solution for how I should deal with this, I’m all ears.
Anyway, I’m just saying that for the courses I take, this is a helpful feature, and though I understand that some don’t like it, I hope they keep it as an toggled option.
in my own courses I either 1. introduce all synonyms or 2. give hints. Many course creators do these.
In these fora there are threads for specific courses, I hope you noticed. Such issues are usually posted in there, so the creator/contributors can do something about them. Having auto-accept is not a solution for learning anything, just for guessing.
I can understand the creators/contributors have zero desire nowadays to ever correct anything anymore, Memrise is not treating them nicely, rather the contrary… I am one of those creators/contributors, who preferred to rather give up on curating courses (also my best courses have been private for a while now).
With my experience of soon 5 years on memrise, such auto-accept is detrimental for learning and just another step in the direction of closing down the web version of memrise. Thanks goodness a mild soul offered in here a solution for obliterating the “on-screen keyboard”
Yeah, these aren’t courses I created, and while some of the courses I’m talking about have creators who will update them to address these issues, some of them have creators who don’t seem to even be active at all. If the courses you’re using don’t have any of these issues, then yeah, auto-accept doesn’t offer anything useful. But for those of us whose courses do have them, it solves a major headache.
You can take the courses that pose problems on the app, and those that are good on the website. I have one or two courses which irritate me a lot because of that “synonyms problem”, and the app is perfect then. But for real learning, I need the website, without auto-accept and without hints.
What I’ve done with these synonyms is to make my own word lists (courses) where I give myself a hint to distinguish between the two words, “ignoring” the original words during testing and replacing them on my own list. For example, I have (in an Italian course) “raggirare (r…)” and then “ingannare (i…)” which are both synonyms for “to deceive” in English. So now they are listed separately and I can learn them both. It’s a little time-consuming, but I’ve found that it has really helped. So no need for auto-accept
