Before I start, I’d like to say I’m a huge fan of Memrise and Memrise Pro! It’s what made me start (properly) learning a language as well as lot’s of other random things which are all really interesting and useful. Apologies if this has been mentioned before, I had a search and couldn’t find it.
I’ve been using Duolingo alongside MR for a while now (Grammar, sentence structure and useful tips from DL and vocab from MR), but I’ve noticed I’m starting to use Duolingo more and more compared to Memrise. The main reason for this is it’s ability to let an ‘almost correct’ or, especially, a typo pass by without having to type it out again.
I tend to make a lot of mistakes while typing, and it’s annoying to have to re-write an entire sentence, not just once but several times, because you missed a letter or because of a typo. A recent example is when I was reviewing the american states quiz and I wrote “Wisconisn”. MR said ‘nearly’ and then proceeded to test me on Wisconsin about 4/5 more times in that review. It’s not so bad for a singular word but for longer sentences in the language courses it is really dull when you KNOW the answer.
I get that in a language course spelling is important, but DL has worked out a way to identify typos and let them slip, is there a way to bring that to MR?
One possible solution is to use Memrise Turbo. It’s a script that you install in your browser. (See this thread in the old forums.)
If you’re using Firefox, you’ll need the addon Greasemonkey. For Chrome, you’ll need Tampermonkey. If you’re already familiar with GreaseMonkey/TamperMonkey and scripts, you can go directly to github.com and download it.
This script is designed to advance you immediately to the next question, without the usual pause between an answer and a question. The added bonus, the feature that’s relevant to you, is this: it advances as soon as it recognizes that you’ve typed a valid answer. If it doesn’t advance, you’ve got a typo! You simply have to learn not to press the enter key anymore…
If you’re doing sentences, you risk running out of time while finding your typo. Someone created a script to disable the timer.
These two scripts combined make Memrise even more fun to use.
In the Android app - and I presume the iOS app - answers will not be automatically accepted if the typed answer is not exactly correct. I like this more than the Duolingo system because I can decide whether I made a typo or legitimately didn’t know the answer myself. I’m surprised this feature hasn’t been integrated into the web app.
I would caution against using this, for exactly this reason: You will sometimes advance when you didn’t actually know the right answer, but you’ll think you did know it. Or, maybe you weren’t confident between two variations, but with this, you detected the correct one before you actually decided which one you want to go with - and then you might still believe you really knew it all along. You will fool both yourself and memrise into thinking you know things better than you actually do, and they will thus be scheduled for review further in the future than they should be, and overall you’ll learn less effectively.
Note that if you get an answer “yellow”, while it does ask you several more times during the same session, it is not treated the same as a “red”. If you get it right the next time it comes up for review, then it will be treated as if you got it right without having gotten it wrong first, rather than slowly ramping up the review time like what happens when you get something red.
So yes, it is annoying to have to repeat the same phrase several times in a review session due to a typo, and it would be nice if memrise let you tell it “hey that was just a typo”, but the fix being suggested here is IMO worse than the problem it fixes, because it’ll actually make your learning worse. Which, IMO, is worse than just having to type something a few more times.
[quote=“cos, post:5, topic:1508”]
I would caution against using this, for exactly this reason: You will sometimes advance when you didn’t actually know the right answer, but you’ll think you did know it.[/quote]
This should only occur when you accidentally type the correct answer while meaning to type an incorrect answer, or when an incorrect answer is accepted by the program. The latter is a fault of the creator or the program, not the learner.
The former is a more complex issue. Yes, you could accidentally type the correct answer, but my own anecdote is that the frequency that I accidentally type the correct answer is definitely much lower than the frequency that I mistype while knowing the correct answer. You could argue that I should check my spelling before I submit, but this also slows down the process and is subject to my faults again, as my mind often fills in the gaps when I am checking. Then check more carefully you could argue, but then the process would be slowed again. I want to learn as much as possible in the least amount of time, so I prefer automatic submission.
[quote=“cos, post:5, topic:1508”]
Or, maybe you weren’t confident between two variations, but with this, you detected the correct one before you actually decided which one you want to go with - and then you might still believe you really knew it all along.[/quote]
If you’ve entered an answer, how have you not decided on which one to go with? You have to choose an answer to enter it.
If you were thinking of entering an answer without being sure that’s it correct, then that’s a separate issue. You can enter answers and not be sure if they are correct and be lucky without automatic submission. That is the learner’s fault for treating Memrise as a game or a graded test and not a learning tool.
A similar problem occurs without automatic submission. You know the correct answer, but you make an error when entering the answer so your answer is marked incorrect. Thus the thing you were learning or reviewing is scheduled to be learned or reviewed earlier than it should. This definitely isn’t as problematic as having items scheduled later than they should though. Personally, I rarely accidentally enter the correct answer, so the problem you noted is not much of a problem for me.
Automatic submission COULD make your learning worse is not the same as automatic submission WILL make your learning worse.
What damages your learning is if memrise mischedules the next review for too far in the future, based on a erroneously thinking you know something better than you actually know it. Whether or not it shows you the corrected right answer would not affect this; what matters is whether memrise schedules its next review based on thinking you know it or thinking you don’t know it. With this script, memrise will believe you know it even on some occasions when you don’t.
Absolutely not. People very frequently type something and then rethink it and correct themselves before they hit enter. Except sometimes, their “correction” was wrong, and what they thought at first was actually right - they just had too low a confidence about it. In such a situation, fooling memrise into thinking they really did know it will mess up the learning schedule. Also, for longer phrases, it’s not at all uncommon to think there’s one more word at the end when there actually isn’t, and with this script, your answer gets auto-submitted before you have a chance to complete the answer you intended to enter (but which was incorrect). Worse, on memrise any phrase with a comma is considered complete as soon as you type the portion before the first comma. You can use this to “cheat” in a way, by intentionally hitting enter after only entering the first part of the answer because you know there’s a comma there and you don’t remember what goes after the comma, but I don’t and I think most people don’t. However, with an auto-submit script, your answer would be submitted as soon as you get to that point. Finally, there are often alts that are shorter substrings of the intended answer, placed there just in case someone actually already knows the language and knows the shorter word, but someone new to the language who doesn’t know it may be trying to learn the longer word. An auto-submit will cut you off when you’ve typed the shorter alt, and never let you complete the longer word. So those are four examples of how this fails.
Yes, this is a problem. Memrise could do two things to solve this, both of which have been suggested many times in the forums, though Memrise has so far ignored them:
Get rid of the stupid timer! And bonus scores for quick answers! Feeling like you’re being timed and under time pressure induces people to impulsively make errors or fail to proofread.
Allow the user to say “that was a typo” on yellow incorrect answers. Omit repetitions of that one from the rest of that review session if it was declared a typo.
I am very confident that it WILL. It’s just hard to see when you’re using it, because the way it undermines you is a way that you are very strongly likely to be fooled into not thinking is happening.
Oh, and of course I forgot one of the most likely failure modes of autosubmit: Where you think the answer is a shorter substring of the real answer. Often happens where the shorter string is a different part of speech, or a related word that is in the course but means something a little bit different. You may very well kinda remember the longer word but think the shorter one is the answer, until you type it and see that it doesn’t autosubmit, and that prompts you to type the longer word, which does autosubmit. Then, in hindsight, you think you knew it all along, and forget that you would’ve hit enter on the shorter (and wrong) answer if it hadn’t been for autosubmit.
…to much philosophy! Things are always simpler!
You will learn it eather way. Eather on correctness, or on your mistakes.
Correctness is very often only a matter of coincidence. You will have to repeat the whole set of words in the course a few dozen times to make it memorable. Probably not for a lifetime!
[quote=“cos, post:8, topic:1508”]
Absolutely not. People very frequently type something and then rethink it and correct themselves before they hit enter. Except sometimes, their “correction” was wrong, and what they thought at first was actually right - they just had too low a confidence about it. In such a situation, fooling memrise into thinking they really did know it will mess up the learning schedule.[/quote]
You omitted the part of my response that addresses this part of your response, but I will admit that it’s not really realistic to expect people to control themselves, and the problem becomes worse with automatic submission.
I’ve never actually had this happen before, but I’m only learning French at the moment. With more dissimilar languages to my own - like Mandarin - I can definitely see that being a problem.
I’ve never experienced that problem with automatic submission - but I use the Android app - and did not know that Memrise quantified completion that way. That’s a separate issue from automatic submission though.
I’ve never experienced this before, though as I mentioned before, I use the Android app. I’ve typed shorter answers that were accepted when I pressed submit but were not automatically submitted many times in the Android app. I assume that’s because Memrise has determined an intended answer, at least for the Android app. Does this occur in the web app?
For sentences with comas, I simply omit the first letter of the first word, type the rest of the answer, and then go back and add the first letter.
I’m not worried about automatic submission making my learning worse. First of all, the app already behaves this way; it advances when you’ve typed or tapped the correct answer, so the Memrise programmers must not think it’s that serious of an issue. Second, even if there are a few items here and there that I don’t learn as well, I believe I come out ahead in the long run anyway.
Why? Because with Memrise Turbo, Memrise is more fun. Having more fun means I do more Memrise. I’d rather plant 30-50 words per day and know 80-90% of them really well than plant 5-15 words per day and know all of them. Besides, I can always add items to the difficult words list if I’m not confident I know them well.
I’ve started to use Memrise more because Duolingo is so ridiculously off in what it accepts. It accepts random scripts for English including Kanji symbols. It accepts the wrong words.
This is actual one of the best features of Memrise - not reinforcing the wrong answers.
If they dumb down this app they can say goodbye to a lot of paid customers.
I’m learning Arabic, and it’s pretty frustrating that the exact transliteration is demanded, even though there is no one right answer. I’m learning with books at the same time, and several memrise courses, and they all have different versions of the transliterations. This is fine, I can cope with this, but not that the course demands I write the word exactly as the course maker chose.
I think with the official arabic courses memrise does accept variations, but not on the ‘Learn Basic Lebanese’.
(we - some)