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.
BTW I think I’ll also try the LATAM series to get a solid knowledge of all verb endings:
https://www.memrise.com/user/aitchdubya/courses/teaching/
I start to realize I need to speed up my learning tempo…
Early on Memrise, my word learning pace was 200/hour. I think it really depends on the person.
I was able to increase the pace to 150 per hour since then.
200 is a bit much still.
Perhaps you were taking short measurements and extrapolating.
@CrazyDave2345
Impressive. Lots of numbers, I guess.
Numbers?
It was this course if I remember correctly.
I also found that it is possible to review 1200 words in 1 hour.
Those numbers really redefine the way you approach your studies.
Never mind. Don’t mind me.
In the current state I would say Anki.
Memrise is a mess:
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.
