Hey, I am a teacher and use Memrise to help motivate my 11 year old students.
It’s been great, the kids love it. I only use it for a few weeks a year.
Today, the children discovered the word “shit” in the word list…and it’s French equivalent. Totally think it’s not appropriate. Any chance it could be removed?
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You would need to state the name of the course (with the link) and preferably tag the author of the course. If after that, you don’t get a response. I would choose “ignore” for that word and any other similar ones.
How do you select “ignore”?
Go the level where the word you want to ignore is (I do this on my computer, not the App). At the top of all the words in that level you will see a small icon on the right with the word ‘Ignore’, click on that then scroll down till you get to the word and on the right you’ll see a little box. Click in that, then scroll to the bottom and select “Save”.
Why do you think it’s inappropriate to have this word in the dictionary? Your little students do not shit? Last time I checked shit was utterly natural thing in this world. By the way, it could be helpful to know how to say “shit” in some sort of an emergency, and motivating, too. For children “shit” is funnier, than “apple”, for instance. Of course, if you do not want to bore them to death.
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I see your point exactly. It is the unfortunate truth that some words carry greatly differing meanings (and emphasis) in other languages. In England, polite people usually don’t say “bloody” as they consider it crude. It means nothing in the US. I was taught that in France (at lease) “merde” was not considered impolite and was commonly used, unlike its translated counterpart in US English. I found this to be more common than one would think in other languages, but there ae plenty of words I can recall off the top of my head that are perfectly fine in, say, German or Latin, but can disrupt a class (and get comments from angry parents). As I said, I agree, but there isn’t much we can do but explain how this happens.
My Granny would slap you with a wet dish cloth for using such words, we all use such words these days but sometime regret it too. Children should learn about when it is appropriate to use such words and when it is not. Sadly when such words come up in a classroom full of children I can imagine it would cause disturbance and more than a little chuckling, it did in my school days.
In French level 2, my 10 years old daughter was seeing translations written as “Fuck-yeah!” or something very similar using the F word. In addition to all the other France-only slang words taught in Memrise which are NOT part of the normal French language (I’m native French and I don’t even know them), Memrise seems more like a bad joke than a serious way to learn a language.
Are you serious?
Sometimes.
Having the same issue as I use Memrise with my students.
I emailed Memrise and they said that they wanted their official language courses to reflect real life language. I understand that and I’m not offended by swear words, but given that the beginners courses are automatically assigned when a student sets up an account, it’s difficult to avoid it and it will cause issues for some parents.
Is there any way we can stop the courses being automatically assigned when someone creates an account?
I was surprised when I saw that too. But I say shit often and I imagine other people do too. At least when you hear it you’ll know what they are saying. I say keep the word but offer another option,
say like… poop too. lol