Just something I was testing:
If in a course I have, e.g. “versenden” = “to ship, to dispatch” with a synonym “verschicken” and I also have “verschicken” = “to ship, to dispatch” with a synonym “versenden”, to ensure that the learner will get presented with both headwords then unfortunately you also get the case that the learner can be presented with “to ship, to dispatch”, given both versenden and verschicken as possible multiple-choice answers, and be marked wrong if you select the one other than what was internally expected (despite there being no way for the user to tell). @Hung-phan I’ve added these to my level in your course to test and confirm this.
Given that, is there any good/safe way for a course to contain two entries with different headwords but the same clue? Other than having some odd sort of hint like “(no i)” that appears for one but not the other…
Have you found anything like a corpus database for German? They are absolutely brilliant for finding examples which ONLY work with one particular word.
I’ve no idea how I (or anyone) could come up with a sentence where versenden could be used but not verschicken…at any rate including whole sentences makes it a very different sort of course (and I already have ones like that)
I specifically chose this example because a) the meanings, as far as I can tell, are identical and b) the two words are very similar morphologically so there’s no obvious hint you can give based on starting letter, number of syllables etc.
With words that I really haven’t dug into yet, I simply write ("not “verschicken”). Most of the course participants seem happy with that one so far.
I was trying to think of examples of the top of my head, but I wasn’t able to think of any, either, and I am always getting emails telling me things like “wir haben Ihr Paket versandt/verschickt”.
I can only think of a compound noun, “Versandtasche”, but that doesn’t help you
Have you ever used the word reference forum?
You might want to try there. Maybe some German native speaker can think of some difference!
I would ask, “Can any of you think of a sentence where it is ONLY possible to use “verschicken” and NOT “versenden” and vice versa?”
Maybe there is some saying where one of them is used and not the other.
I don’t consider putting (not “{some-other-complete-German-word}”) an option sorry. The clues should be in English and not provide hints or pointers to German words in themselves. In many cases doing that basically gives away the expected answer, as it’s clearly something very similar to it.
Actually I just thought of one - putting a single entry as “versenden; verschicken”.
That way in typing tests you can type either, but you’ll see still both words for multiple choice & tapping tests.
I’d only use it as a last-last resort for extreme cases like this.
OK, here we have an example where a PERSON is “verschickt”. I wonder if you can also say “versandt” for a person?
It looks like you can…
All I have found so far is that it is far more normal in everyday German to say, “ich habe X verschickt” when you are talking about sending stuff via a smartphone. “er hat Nacktbilder von mir verschickt” is what regular people would say, not “er hat … versendet”, that sounds too formal.
I am just googling stuff here, I hope you don’t mind.
Basically, I think the difference is one of formality. “Verschicken” is more informal than “versenden”. Teenagers wouldn’t use the word “versenden” to refer to having sent something on their phones.
I would do something like this (even though you don’t like this idea), I would add this phrase in the definition:
Interesting to know anyway. Versenden rates are rather more common than verschicken in the various sources I checked. But I think it’s an artifact of the way word frequency stats are gathered that often more formal/academic/technical terminology ends up being ranked above everyday/colloquial vocabulary, particularly given the German penchant for writing down rules and regulations in intricate detail.
I just put in “verschicken” in google and there were all these hits about “Nacktbilder verschicken”
You are absolutely right about the sources, though. There is - for technical reasons - a lot more formal vocabulary in various corpora than the spoken versions of a language, so if “versenden” appears more often then that has nothing to do with usage by real people on the street.
You could ask on that forum I linked to, but I would bet my bottom dollar on “verschicken” being more informal in the context of smartphone use.
So I suppose you could get away with two entries “to send, to dispatch (formal)” and “to send, to dispatch (informal)” in this case but without input from a native speaker I’m not sure I can make that call.
Well sure, if you’re a native speaker and you spend long enough thinking about any given pair of apparent synonyms you can probably come up with some case or another where they’re not interchangeable, but my initial post was more about the fact that Memrise itself asks users to make an impossible choice between two possible answers, and how to work around that as a general case.
I’m really sorry you’re having this issue but I’d like to let you know that there are some ways, to edit the course so that it works with your particular case.
that’s exactly what I’d like to do but it triggers a bug in Memrise that means the user might have to make an impossible guess on a multiple choice question as to which entry is meant when both are shown.
