掲示板 Forums - [OPINIONS REQUESTED] - How to treat conjugated terms w/ mastery levels

While they aren't common, some textbooks/user lists have conjugated terms. An example is Chapter 9 of genki I (kanji vocab lists)

来る
来ない
来ません

Two questions:

1. Do you think the mastery levels of these 3 terms should be separate, even though they are the same base word? (Currently, they are treated as the same.)

2. What do you think is the ideal way to display definitions for conjugated terms? From a technical standpoint, it'd be easier to say (for 来ない) something like

来ない
意味: [color=red][present, plain negative conjugation of][/color] to come (spatially or temporally), to approach, to arrive; to come back, to do ... and come back; to come to be, to become, to get, to grow, to continue; to come from, to be caused by, to derive from; to come to (i.e. "when it comes to spinach ...")

Bonus question:

What about terms with helper verbs (like 知っている, 持って来る, 死んじゃう (死ぬ+しまう, abbreviated)? It'd be very harder I think to display a good definition for those 'automatically' like above. Some combinations still are close to the base definition, while others (like 持って来る or 書いておく) have additional meaning that can't be explained just by giving the conjugation notes.

Thanks - I want to fix this to work with what everyone wants/expects, so let me know!

1. I agree that for normal terms the base form should be used. Otherwise some might mistake the conjugated forms for completely different vocab. Would it be possible to set a preference for the quiz to use example sentences with that conjugation?

2. The form you use right now in the quiz looks good. Conjugated form, specifying what conjugation is used, plain form, definition with note that it's for the plain form.

Bonus: when the meaning it altered through the use of helper verbs, it effectively turns it into a different term, in my opinion.

The irregular verbs might qualify for separate mastery levels, but in general I think the different verb forms should all contribute to just one mastery level.

A verb-helper pair just doesn't feel like a separate vocab word to me, more like grammar.

Leave it the way it is - teach conjugation seperately, I say

I would favor just the dictionary form for vocabulary mastery, and a separate conjugation test asking eg for the て form or present negative form of the presented dictionary form

Thanks for everyone's input so far. Let me answer a few implied questions, and clear up a few things:

1. The red text will (in the future) appear only when there's a conjugation in the question.

2. While there will be conjugation grammar quizzes in the future, this is not a discussion of that, so 'dont use the conjugations' is not an option. Some textbooks list conjugations as part of the vocab, so removing them isn't possible. Subsequently, this is not a discussion to *add* conjugation to the quizzes where it doesn't already exist (only 200 terms across all the lessons in the entire site).

3. There'll be ways to measure mastery on conjugations as a grammar element, but that's a ways off.

[quote]
B. If anything, just when you describe "helper verb," "to do in advance(おく)," etc. can't you make those words into links that go to their proper grammar pages? If they aren't there, create them, do what you can and I'm sure some of us can fill in the blanks, if there are any.[/quote]

This works for the term lists (and is already mostly enabled in the beta version of the site), but it doesn't really work in a quiz environment, something like hiragana->definition or definition->hiragana.

If a list contains 持って行く or 来ない and the user chooses (in two quizzes) hira->def and def->hira, what would you expect to have as a question? What about　閉まっておく？

******

I think I'll keep the mastery level the same for conjugations, although I'm still not convinced about the best path for helper verbs. I'm leaning towards making those separate words, and in the future, enable the site to let the user know about the individual words that make up a term+helper.

So here's the main question remaining (as I noted above) - ignoring term lists, how do you want conjugations to appear in non-sentence quizzes when the definition is involved ( xxxxxx->definition or definition->xxxxxx )?

1. Right now the red text appears for ALL kana->def and kanji->def sentence questions, correct? When you say 'appear only when there's a conjugation in the question', it means not only removing it for nouns, but for verbs and adjectives too, as long as they are in the same form as in the lists, right? Otherwise it would give away a bit too much information ('no text -> definitely no noun').
As for fareastfurfaro's concern: I agree that the red is a bit too much. Everytime the text appears I think 'Eh? What did I do wrong now?' Maybe there are other colors that don't look like a getting back a failed math test?^^ (No, I never failed math :P) Yellow, perhaps, with it a little bit of orange? Don't really know what color, but red probably should be reserved for a wrong answer. Anyone know a better way?

2. So you have 来ない in a terms list and you want it to get quizzed as 来ない, not 来る (non sentence quiz). I think the way you proposed looks quite ok.
A kana/kanji->def question would then have '[present, plain negative conjugation of] to come ....' listed in the multiple choice answers. Preferably every answer for that question should have a little conjugation description then. So the answer would get a bit long, but it does that for some questions anyway. After answering it should appear like it does for conjugated terms in the sentence mode: Conjugated form, dictionary form, conjugation used, definition.

A def->kana/kanji question would then ask for '[present, plain negative conjugation of] to come....' and either have four conjugated terms (same conjugation for all four terms, or random? Anyone know what's best?) for multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank.

No additional input on helper verbs, sorry.

I'm probably going to take the general consensus on the conjugations, and slowly (there's not too many of them, really) move over the helper verbs terms that have completely different meanings (like 持って来る) into a new term, and leave ones like 知っている.

As for people giving suggestions - this is normal, and I can't really fault users for not saying anything. I used to run a site that had 200 times the number of daily users and the feedback was still extremely low when it comes to actually discussing bugs, etc. It's a mix of two things: difficulty of reporting (I get many more error reports from the quizzes because you can click a button, write one sentence, and be done with it) than I get from a thread like this (you have to step away from what you're doing, read at least a few paragraphs [my post], maybe everyone else's, then give an answer that's probably going to be longer than shorter)

, and just ...indifference. I'm guilty of the same thing, I have no doubt you are, and everyone else has had times like this. Most people don't visualize the person/people behind a website, I think. So, if there's a small problem, unless it completely obstructs you doing what you really want/need to do, you (as a user) are probably more likely to just ignore it than think you need to contact someone behind the site and ask them to fix it.

or (just thought of this one) - people also see sites as huge things with tons of users. If you have a problem, you might think 'this is probably common, so I'm sure one of the other tens of thousands of users has mentioned something', so you don't need to. I've lost count over the years where I'd get a message that reported a not-so-small error that had been around for awhile, but when it finally got reported, the user would say "I'm sure you've already gotten a hundred reports on this, but...".

They feel like they need to apologize for reporting the bug and taking up my time, which is backwards, since finding bugs helps me do my job to improve the site.

In short, there's lots of reasons that people don't comment/report, and they all make sense, so that's just the way things are. :)