I would add D) a place where you kind of learn something but what it is really about is playing a free online game.
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Something like Quizlet is a bit like memrise with more games about the words. There are community and self made courses. You can play a few matching or asteroid games with the words plus flashcards. What its missing is actual spaced repetition although all your words do sort into categories based on how often you get them wrong so you can focus more on harder words.
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cerego is the leanest…i.e. not a gaming site, but a learning site (which is free). I did not use it recently, did not cross my mind memrise would again spiral down so fast. Hope memrise comes back in its full, old glory
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No course for me yet… but wow… this site looks so impressing!
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I don’t seem to connect with Anzi. I tried several times but I don’t seem to understand it.
I love Quizlet. I used it many times in the past, before memrise, and even today I use it to send stuff to my smartphone to learn on the tram. I find it very easy to use and very simple.
The only reason I don’t use it full time is because memrise has an algoritm that shows the cards when you need (or so they claim) while in Quizlet you don’t have such thing. But Quizlet remains my plan B.
I am a premium user but today I tried to give up. But since I don’t get any kind of refund I will wait until expiration period and cancel it then.
I loved memrise 2 years ago, everything was working, simpler but reliable. Currently I am almost one week without using my main courses because I can’t type it…
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I admit I’ve only tried to use Memrise for languages so far, and I think if the initial design had just been for a generic fact-learning site (with spaced repetition), it wouldn’t work particularly well for languages, as there are quite a few special features about languages. But even for languages there’s quite a few things that Memrise can’t really do - e.g. how would you create a course for learning how to pronounce the letters of the alphabet in a language (i.e. basically an audio-only course). Duolingo supports audio answering, which is pretty cool, though for anything longer than a 3 or 4 syllable answer you’d have to retry so many times as to be more frustrating than productive.
But honestly by far and way the main reason Memrise beats out the alternatives (despite everything wrong with it and its steady decline over the last 2 years) is the powerful ability to edit and maintain your own courses. There’s only one course now I keep using where I don’t have edit rights and it constantly annoys me that I can’t make minor adjustments and fixes to it. Sites like duolingo or busuu or any other number of language-learning sites with pre-set content just annoy me because there are always issues with the content, or there’s no good way to tailor it to help you learn specifically to what you most want and what you have the most trouble remembering.
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I came from Quizlet to Memrise and may return there. Clozemaster also sounds interesting. But I will give Memrise a few more days to return to something like normal.
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how good were these two for Hindi? (Id mean in general for non-latin scripts… I have to advance my Mandarin pronto, and did not really found a suitable replacement
(cerego is fine in a certain measure, but the team is rather self-righteous and stubborn; they also give all sort of stupid advice between sessions, maybe the majority of their users are a bit… moronic?)
and wohok /clozemaster etc seem useful just for consolidating info that one already learnt previously)
Thanks for all the recommendations. I’ve started using Lingvist for brushing up my Spanish, and it’s excellent - I’m looking forward to them adding other languages.
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anki and a basic “german for dummies” book is where I’m heading. I want to learn a language not play a language based game which is what memrise seems to actually be at this point.
Sad!
does anybody know a slim version of Anki (i find editing of cards very cumbersome in Anki)
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Is there an alternative to Anki with a user friendly GUI and typing option?
From what I saw when I looked at Anki, it’s software you download and run locally, right? It’s not somewhere where you can browse through all the courses lots of other people have mind, find surprisingly obscure things people have made good courses for, connect with other people who are taking the same courses, and collaboratively point out problems in a course and get them fixed - right?
Yes and no.
Yes, it’s software you download and run locally, but it also has an online synchronization feature, so you can study on your computer and on your phone, pretty much seamlessly.
No, it has no game-like or social aspects or forums like memrise, for example, but there are many publicly shared decks that people have created on a wide range of subjects that you can easily download and use without problems.
It isn’t strictly text-based. You can also have audio or visual elements on the flashcards. For example, you could have an image of a classic painting paired with its painter, or the sound of a guitar chord paired with its name.
Main page here: http://ankisrs.net/
Online synchronized practice of your decks can be done here: https://ankiweb.net/about
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Thanks a lot! It is very interesting web site!
Trying it now!
I’d say for many here (myself included) the “game” like aspect of Memrise is definitely part of what helps us keep up our daily learning, and along with the ability to use anywhere with an internet connection and course editing features is why there really are no truly good alternatives that I know of. At any rate nobody should be relying on one single method for language learning, and given Memrise’s recent history it’s probably a good time to start looking around at other ways to complement it.
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I’ve heard good things about Language Zen (but I haven’t used it yet). However, while it is free to use at first, you’ll eventually have to pay if you want to do more. It’s also a relatively new program so the only language they have is Spanish.
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Anki has a typing option, probably more than one. On the whole, this program is very flexible and has a great choice of possibilities. The only drawback (if it is a drawback) is that you need to read some documentation on their site or to google it, not all the functions are obvious at first sight. I guess you are right, Anki is not particularly user-friendly 
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Downloading a deck sounds like you then have a separate copy of it than anyone else does. If you find a problem I guess you fix it yourself? But then, it may be that plenty of other people found and fixed the same problem in their own download, but you still got the bad deck… or is there some central way of sharing updates with everyone who’s using the same deck as you?
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