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一時 - one o'clock, temporarily, or moment?

What are the actual Kana? Words like いちがつ and ひとつき are two different words but both can be represented by the Kanji 一月.

All of these meanings are represented as いちじ at least according to wwwjdic.

Just to confuse things more 英辞郎 on the web has it as: at one point （in time), for an undisclosed period

The first one seems to encapsulate a lot of the meanings.

Okay, that makes it difficult... I still think they might be 'different' words, though I would definitely put the alternative English meanings down. I think having multiple entries for very unique uses of words should be okay: 1) いちじ - one o'clock 2) いちじ - moment Yes, they might get confusing when learned together, but when a person makes a specific course they can choose the entry they want that course to focus on.

I dunno... 難しいだね。。。

http://www.memrise.com/item/988554/moment-17/ I think this one should be merged into temporarily.

一時の > いちじの > temporary, momentary 一時> ひととき > moment (it's already an entry, http://www.memrise.com/item/807081/moment-10/)

nice!

一時 means both, but the pronunciation will be either いちじ (1 o'clock) or ひととき (a little while/moment). on memrise, this would lead to two different words. both are NOT synonyms at all.

(putting the の) after it is like adding genders to nouns in other language topics - not so great. you learm that "Schrank" is male, but memrise doesn't ask you for "der Schrank" for a reason. i would remove that particle, it does more harm than good.

一時 いちじ (n-t, n-adv, adj-no, n) 一時 ひととき (n-t,n-adv,arch)

they're also different parts of speech used as an adverb, 一時の would be incorrect

and by the way, why do we teach grammar on memrise? there's no need to teach the same thing in every imaginable inflected form. wasn't the convention like that anyways, originally? that's like teaching the masu-stem for every verb as a noun separately.

That makes a lot of sense.

OK, after doing a bit of research and asking a few 'natives' this is what I found out about all this:

ひととき means 'a moment' for example:

くつろいだひととき a relaxing moment.

It is often written in kana like ひととき or ひと時, as you can see in these examples over at 英辞郎.

いちじ on the other hand is usually written in kanji and means 'for a moment' or 'temporary' and generally not 'a moment' and can not be used in the same way as ひととき.

Most Japanese understand which pronunciation to use from context.

So, I'm thinking for the 一時 -> いちじ word, we should put 'for the moment' or 'temporary'. We can put 1 o'clock in the alternatives, but we already have 1 and o'clock as words so what is the point of having "1 o'clock"?

For 一時 -> ひととき maybe put '(a) moment'? I think this word is generally older and more poetic sounding from what I could gather.

Just remove the Kanji or parts of it and be done with it. It doesn't matter whether or not it's written language or not (Japanese has quite a bit of that), as at the end of the day, you'll be better off having learned those, too.

I was never suggesting that we should add the の to the word. Sorry for making things more confusing. I was trying to add context (for this forum discussion) of different ways that the word is used.

My only point was that we don't need http://www.memrise.com/item/988554/moment-17/ since we already have http://www.memrise.com/item/807081/moment-10/ and http://www.memrise.com/item/842230/one-oclock-3/ ..... which need to be separate, as Mac said.

I don't get what you mean andi. How do you think the entry should be?

Hmm? I explained that above. Make 2 cards, one for "moment", one for "1 o'clock".

But TBH, who on earth needs to learn "1 o'clock" here?

If one doesn't know it, they're better off doing some basic stuff first, because amassing vocab in isolated fashion does nothing for beginners.

OK, so I'm going with what I suggested above, that seems to make the most sense.

@ikenaiAndi I'm not sure how the idea of having 1 o'clock as one of the definition came up, but I don't think we need it either, I'm just going to put it down as 'for a moment' that seems to make the most sense.

As for merging the words cacoethes, we don't have a lot of fine control over the merging process. For example, I can't pick out two words of my choosing and merge them. The interface just gives us a random selection of what is in the dictionary. Hopefully these two words will pop up soon and we can put this all to bed.

Anyway, thanks everyone for the comments and the clarifications. I'm sure I'll be picking your brains again soon :)

"we don't have a lot of fine control over the merging process"

Oh, that is very good to know. Thank you. _._

Realistically, each entry is a unique word. What kanji they are represented by is just a happenstance. For example the kanji for 一月 represents both いちがつ and ひとつき. But these are two different words (with two different English meanings). Therefore, I think the same would be true for 一時.

Also, I think many people would like to learn the 'words' いちじ、にじ、etc. Though it is a compound word of 1 and hour, it is unique as being 'one o'clock' compared to いちじ（かん） for 'one hour'.

The same would be true for other compound situations. As IkenaiAndi says, you don't need to learn おんがくまつり if you already know おんがく and まつり, but it doesn't hurt to see the two together and I would argue it is a useful compound word...

ひととき　and いちじ are two different words.

It's perfectly fine to have compounds like 駐車場、拘束時間、精神的ショック and so on. It would make sense to teach the parts, then the compound in order, so it'll be like building a house with bricks, but unfortunately, you get most stuff randomized here. You might know 拍手喝采する before you learn 拍手. That's a different story, but.. "1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock" and so on are similar things: little "buildings". Wouldn't it be absolutely cool if we could rearrange the order we teach the words in our lists? There would be so much funky stuff we could do with that, making things so much easier..

"Wouldn't it be absolutely cool if we could rearrange the order we teach the words in our lists?"

Have you tried playing around with the "fix dependencies"? Are you talking about something like this, or something different?

i never touched dependencies, because i don't know exactly what i'd do if i modified those. can you show me a link to an explanation for this?

I can't find an explanation of it anywhere. I will try my best:

For the word 駐車場 you could add 駐車 and 場 as Parents of the word 駐車場. This would automatically make the wordcards 駐車 and 場 show 駐車場 as a Dependent.

If someone has 駐車場 on their list and clicks the "fix dependencies" button, it will add the two Parents 駐車 and 場 to the list, right before 駐車場. That way you learn the building blocks before the longer word.

It's not perfect, because it only works for the words where curators have added the dependents/parents. I am guessing that for the Japanisch topic that means a lot haven't been added yet. :/ Also, once you hit the fix dependencies button, you add every parent the system can find for your words, so you end up adding a bunch of words to your list at once. Test it out on small lists first lol.

@ikenaiAndi - if go to edit any word there is a 'dependents' section off to the right, you can click add there to add a word that must be learned before you learn the word you are currently on. In that way you can link say 行ってくる to 行く and 来る if you wanted to. Then the system will give you 行く and 来る before it gives you 行ってくる.

Or at least that is how I understand it.

err wait, I think you need to add 行く and 来る to the parents section of 行ってくる sorry. You would add 行ってくる to the dependents of 行く and 来る.

Now, I'm sure I've completely confused everyone.

Is my post I wrote an hour ago not showing up? :'(

It's there. Seems I have to do all that manually. Uhh! __ No way.. ;) That wouldn't leave time for learning, and I've been incredibly busy anyways lately :/ Still trying to catch up with all my due words, managed to fight them down to 490 today.. ahh..

Thanks for your explanation :)