After completing the memrise course on dovahzul i have a few suggestions to make.

My main concern is that compound words are introduced long before the nouns that make that compound are. The problem is, that you have a hard time getting what a compound word means when you dont know its compounds. later in the course the various words are explained but by then you already know from earlier lessons.

Like dovahsos - dragonblood. Ok thats an easy one but you learn the word sos like 200 words later. it would make more sense to first introduce the words dovah and sos and then dovahsos.

Same for words like qethsegol - by the time this word is introduced you dont know what queth or se mean you just know gol and so the word doesnt make much sense.

the hardest one for me was whiterun ahrolsedovah - i was like "wtf?"  but later on it is explained what ahrol and se are and with that knowledge its muuuuuuuch easier to remember ahrol se dovah. imagine id give you a german compound word like

weihnachtsbaumschmuckbehälter - a box storing decoration for christmas.

now learn that word. Good luck remembering it.

if i tell you it translates as christmas(weihnacht) tree(baum) decoration(schmuck) box(behälter) you would likely remember it quite well as you know how the word comes into being so rather than memorising this huuuge wall of text youd remember and recognise the compounds its made of

another example would be hofkahjun - palace. all words i know is jun - makes sense that a jun has a palaces but is hofkah a house, a stronghold, a camp, a tent, a castle? no idea. it takes another 200 words before we learn that hofkah is steading. It may even be misleading as we already learned kah is pride so hof whatever that means prideking? you get the idea. 

The other thing bothering me a bit is that sometimes you learn very similiar words together. this makes the lesson itself very boring as you have the very same word over and over and over again in slight variations like kras krasnaar and krasnovaar. 

It would have more effect on the memory if these words would be spread throughout the course

Also it would help if all words could be voiced - while most are and thats great, the ones missing a voice are bothering me.

Finally there are some times 2 words for one and the same english translation, so 2 words seem to mean the exactly same thing just that they dont but that is (apart from difference betwen do and se) not made clear in the course itself. It would help greatly if the difference between lets say the 2 kinds of "unending" would be explained so you know when to use which or if there is an actual difference in meaning that cant be translated by just 1 word into english. just like se and do mean the same thing in english but are used differently in dovahzul

I know it is a lot of work to create such a course and i dont know if you can edit / update it but i would really appreciate these little changes

Good points.

Thanks for the feedback, Orkar. The old course had no organization, and one of the things we wanted to do with the new course was organize all the words into thematical categories. The downside is, as you mention, that there are a lot of similar words grouped together, which can make it challenging to memorize. I'm not sure how to solve this without dividing the lessons into unnecessary chunks, but I'm open to suggestions.

well in some cases like the disease stuff that really can be a problem unless you differ the severeness so that one form of disease could move into the death topic and the other 2 stay in the health topic.

Some words seem easier to move - for me. like shadow, unseen, invisibility etc. that lesson was most frustrating for mixing it up all the time.

You could move shadow to a category of natural phenomena like fire wind water shadow...invisibility could be moved to magic and unseen stays at the thief theme.

However i guess the most needed changes are the compound words coming after the components they are made of and explaining the difference between words with seemingly the same meaning like sivaas and sunvaar - is it really the same meaning, if so are the words used differently like do and se?

And if there is no canon answer to that id like to give them a distinction like sivaas refering to beast in terms of feral animals (while the actual word for animal may refer to domestic animals) and sunvaar refering to bestial creatures like trolls, werecreatures and such killing machine things.

Btw huge thanks for creating the memrise course in the first place - i really appreciate it a lot and it helps learning the language very much. So even though i may sound very critical or complaining i really dont mean to - i love the course ^^

Hello everyone, my first post ever (yay) of many.

I agree about the memrise, it is a great tool to use. Well I had so happened to finish the course dealing with the runes when I started playing forelnaar. I was like SWEEET I can read the runes... but that was about it, I ended up using the translator to figure things out. Which got me thinking, Memrise, runes, and Dovahzul..... but as I was reading the posts also I agree on the structure. BUT is there (or will there be ) a course for identifying the word with the runes using the tile selection format?  like the one used for the runes course.

that might help learning Dovahzul a breeez. and if not i would love to help out creating that part of the course. lol

oh and it would be cool if you could give the wordcategory of a word too like

kul (noun) son

kul (adj.) good

cause it can be confusing otherwise. In a text or sentence you have context to rely on in a dictionary / memrise you dont.

or words like

bruniik "savage" is this a noun like a barbarian or an adjective? or even both?

Oh and i found minor typos in the language course on this website - nothing big though you still get what was meant