I think sentence courses, ala Glossika really helps with gaining automatic understanding of certain grammar structures. I think the biggest problem with Memrise is if a sentence course is multiple choice it is easy to guess by high frequency words which diminishes listening comprehension gains, and it is a hindrance when typing if there are a lot of homophones. For example there was a really great course by Student Of Life for Mandarin sentences, but it over-uses the pronoun ta (他，她，它）which can mean he, she, or it. The course did not choose a single pronoun, so you have extra stuff to memorize on top of the content itself. If there are no ambiguities like that, and the sentences are authentic I think Memrise sentence courses are awesome and underutilized. But - I still think for sentences Anki is king.
For example if you want to do a sentence course on memrise which prompts on audio, then you type in your target language, you can make so many silly mistakes which give you the wrong answer (I gave one for Mandarin above). The number of alts grows combinatorially. Additionally, production of the target language is impossible on Memrise even more so due to the alts problem. So the more cognitive load you put on your brain, in terms of “extra” stuff to memorize to get the right answer on Memrise, the more burnt out of learning you can get. Our goal at first in languages, I think, should be to be understood by a native speaker, and through iterative correction converge at proper grammar. So I think enforcing perfect grammar at the very beginning is counterproductive to learning.
Lastly - for listening comprehension and grammar recognition is where I think sentence courses can help the most. For example listening to a sentence once and dictating/typing out that whole sentence and then translating it. Sentence courses on Memrise cannot force you to both dictate and translate to get the right answer. Which is a shame, because I think parallel development of decoding the grammar as well as sound recognition is the best way to develop listening comprehension. So for these reasons - I think you should use Anki for that , also if you have the funds I highly highly recommend Glossika (though I don’t know the quality of the course for the languages you want to focus on). There are tutorials on how to take the 3,000 Glossika sentences and put them into Anki flashcards so you can do SRS on them.
I started Memrise with the official Spanish 1-7 course.
Good quality course, good selection of words and sentences, I just don’t get why they limited the length of the courses. Gives 2-3 examples of grammar features, good for recognizing (reading/listening), but I’d need 20-30 examples to use them (write/speak) confidently. Maybe the Spanish for Polyglots is a good alternative or the old A1-A2 might have more examples. (I dont have too much experience with them.)
I tried one sentence course so far: https://www.memrise.com/course/123071/575-spanish-verbs-sentences/
Good selection of sentences, but lack of alternatives and no active topic to go with my issues. Could be a good course, just not user-friendly. Like @roflcopterlol wrote, many sentences needs memorization of extra stuff to get the right answer. Paused right now.
To get the most out of these courses, don’t just rush through the multiple choice, (often the multiple choice is easy). Instead, listen and repeat on every sentence, every time. You’ll be building a “it just sounds right this way” language intuition.
Many of Swampy’s no-typing courses are paired with a typing course by another user, but as you have mentioned, one soon runs into many alternatives with Spanish sentences.
I don’t think it is contradictory . Some things we as humans classify as small mistakes will still be marked red by Memrise. Some omissions of letters are considered red mistakes, and sometime when I have a typo it is a yellow. Both I would classify as a “mistake”. The cycle (as far as I know) repeats on red mistakes, and if it is yellow you will return to the normal schedule after reviewing again. I think the first person you quoted meant red mistakes.
Thanks the recommendation, great courses! It seems like the some sentences were reused in the Memrise official course. Too bad their audio doesn’t work for me But I’ll give them a try.
In the current state I would say Anki.
Memrise is a mess:
many stupid bugs in the apps; developers are either lazy, incompetent or don’t care
still many errors in language courses, which is an absolute nogo for a language learning plattform
official courses are very limited
broken connection to user generated content
ugly redesign
In this broken state I wouldn‘t recommend Memrise, not even with a free account.
I‘m still learning my current courses with Memrise, but I will move all my learning material to Anki in the next weeks.
I don’t really use either one of them these days anymore as I found a much better approach - daily watching of content on YouTube.
Might sound underwhelming, and not what you would expect, but that is a major breakthrough for me in terms of efficiency and quality of study - enlightenment struck.
YT is a much superior tool than anything else I have encountered after almost 3 years of intensive study with various methods, and it can replace basically almost all of them with ease.
Besides being much more efficient it’s also much more enjoyable and easy to do.
I don’t see much point in grinding with Memrise or Anki these days. Their usability is very limited to only very specific cases. It also became a very tedious chore for me, which I don’t take pleasure in anymore.
All you have to do is: watch, watch, watch.
Can’t be simpler than that.
I am saying this after completing 6 Duolingo’s trees, 5 or 6 official Memrise courses, and accumulating a total of 30,000 words here on Memrise. So I certainly tried what this platform has to offer. I have also studied a dozen or so languages to a fair amount.
Youtube is the best. Hear me on this. No competition at all.
An undiscovered and underutilized gem.
You just have to learn how to use it properly to rip the benefits.
You need a certain level of grammatical understanding and a decently-sized passive lexicon in order to begin to “read, read, read” or (in terms of YouTube) “watch, watch, watch” interesting content as a means of noticeably improving your knowledge of a language. You can go with the most basic of graded readers but even those require some knowledge of the language before beginning, and the easiest graded readers are almost all dreadfully boring. I’d rather stick with drilling vocabulary until I can actually get to the interesting stuff. Yes, I definitely prefer to read interesting books and/or listen to them and watch interesting YouTube content or TV shows or whatever over drilling words and sentences with programs like Duolingo and Memrise, but from my experience it is those drills that let me do the fun stuff as quickly as possible. I could not be more happy about the existence of spaced repetition software, even though it can be really boring at times.
I used to think like that as well but I found this to not be the case.
I could start learning Russian, Dutch, Romanian, Mandarin, Esperanto, Polish through Youtube from basically zero level, and 100% in the target language, from the very start. There are graded materials to practically any level so the point of entry is very low and can fit anyone.
Even intermediate level content a beginner can usually start to process them almost immediately with the help of some tools, so most times I found there is actually almost zero “preparation stage” needed before jumping into the deep waters. Even if you can’t make sense of 90% of the content the 10% you can make sense of would still allow you to progress forward rapidly.
Most languages also bear enough resemblance to other languages so you never actually start from zero, and you know already a lot even without being aware of it.
Since there is no need for any introductory phase, and the Youtube instructional content is much higher quality than Memrise and other apps, there is zero need for anyone to waste time on such tools.
These plugins combinations would allow you to make the most use out of YouTube and to start enjoying the excellent content offered there from your very 1st day:
The only thing left to do is for each person to find the right content suitable for them, and for them to test their “comfort level” with different types of graded content.
But I’ll give them a try.
