New features: Ignore punctuation and ignore accents

neoncube

I've added two new features: "Ignore punctuation while testing" and "Ignore accents while testing" 🙂

When punctuation is ignored, then commas, periods, question marks, exclamation points, etc. are ignored when comparing what you typed and the correct answer. For example "Hello" will be marked as correct even when the answer was "Hello?". "Hello!" would also be marked as a correct answer, which I think is probably okay.

Ignoring accents (diacritics) works similarly: "ano" would be accepted for "año", etc.

When accents are ignored, they're totally ignored, so if the answer should be "holá" and you type "holà", the answer will also be marked as correct. I'd definitely be interested in feedback on if this is what people want or if when this setting is enabled, answers with no accents should be accepted but accents with incorrect accents should be marked wrong.

These are the first features that have settings to control them! 🙂

By default, punctuation is ignored and accents aren't. To change this, go to the new "My account" page:

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Then change the settings and click "Save":

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For now, these settings apply to all courses that you're taking, but it'd be nice if in the future, you could apply them to individual courses (or individual languages?), as we discussed elsewhere 🙂

Let me know what you think! 🙂

Cindy1100

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks great. 🙂

DW7

The only comment I would make is typing accents can be hard (as one needs to know how to access them).

In MemRise a line of characters with various accents could be made available.

Would this be something that you could provide - perhaps for every language that needed them. But even in English we do use them! eg “Resume,” “résumé,” and even “resumé” are accepted and nee and née accepted.

neoncube

DW7 I've made a note to look into this at some point 🙂

schlick

I would prefer when it wants "holá" that it would accept both a and á but not à. That way when you don't have an easy way to type those character you can just ignore it, but ff you implement what DW7 mentioned above then it would be helpful to know when you put the wrong one. I'd at least think that putting the wrong one would be worse than just not putting anything.

neoncube

schlick I think that would make sense 🙂

I'm thinking that if a word has multiple letters with accents, then either all letters would need to be typed with accents or all without accents.

Using the word "résumé" as an example, these would be correct:

résumé
resume

These would be incorrect:

resumé
résume
résumè

neoncube

I've updated the accent testing so that it works as described above 🙂