Unmerge last word?

[mircealungu]

For the interactive reader, there are times when I would like to add to my vocabulary two separate words, as opposed to their merging. E.g., below my first instinct was to think: I wish "har set" and "uddrag" would be saved separately.

Although in this particular case, it might be better to leave the three because it might be more efficient if one learns three words at a time. Even though, we don't have exercises for three words yet.

The first idea that I had today was that after merging a translation one would be able to bring the dropdown and do an split operation that would unmerge the previous translation. However, this might not be the easiest approach. But then, it does not have to be easy, because I don't think it happens too often.

I guess other ideas would be

1. a special button in the toolbar that would

• undo previous merge
• disable merge momentarily (however the user might not realize that they want to disable merging before they do the translation)

2. a special button for splitting a translation. once clicked the user would have to click on a word, and the translation would be split to the left of that word? (q: how would they re-merge if they wanted to? a: hide translation for the separated word, and click it again, which would result in the word being merged again with the previous translations).

3. same as above but the user would have to aim for the space between two words for the split. (Would this be a problem on the mobile? Would it be hard to hit the space between two words on a mobile? because if not, this would definitely be the most intuitive solution I think).

Might there be other alternative solutions?

Should we even do this, or is it a very rare situation when it's needed?

• At least I felt it sometimes,
• Yesterday I was reminded of this also when looking through the journal of one of Klara's participants.

[tfnribeiro]

I also agree that this is a good idea.

Ability to Undo an action is always good to have - a user could for instance "misclick" and now they are stuck with 2 words or not able to learn them at all. The question is then what is the best way to do this.

I think a good starting point could be the Unmerge Last Word, but we could explore a little small interaction with a longer click to just translate the word individually and eventually we could have a complementary action "Merge with Context" if you wanted to get it back with the context.