Can I unselect a mem?

Community-Created Courses How To's
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Edit: this is now solved. Original post remains below:

When I first started learning I checked out the ‘Help me remember this’ feature and I didn’t know that I would automatically select the last viewed mem unless I clicked on ‘Go without a mem’ (quite a bad method from a usability perspective, but that’s another discussion). Now when I go to my profile I can unselect mems that I have created myself but I can not find a list of other people’s mems to remove. Is there any way to unselect this mem?

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You can change your mem selection only when that item/word comes up for review, I think. Well, I know you can do it then; I don’t know if you can do it at any other time.

When you give a correct answer, it waits a few seconds before advancing to the next review item. During those few seconds, after your correct answer turns green, click the “show answer” button below, which will take you to the learning screen as if you’d gotten it wrong (but you’re still credited for getting it right). On that screen, your selected mem is at the bottom, and above it is a link to choose a different mem.

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Just go to your profile. You will see your mems.

For your own mems. Move your mouse to the mem you want to delete.
Two buttons will appear in the right upper corner: one for “edit this mem” and one for “delete this mem”.

For mems you liked.
Click on the “liked” button. Go to the mem you want to remove. You can remove your “like” by clicking on the green thumb.
(and you can also you can flag it as inappropiate with the button in the right upper corner)

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I appreciate your reply. However it does not apply here, I have nothing under my ‘liked’ mems. It seems there may be a difference between liking and selecting a mem.

Alright, thanks! I’ll keep that in mind next time this word comes up. Should be pretty soon, I reckon.

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You can also go to an individual lesson, click Options, and select Preview. Preview shows you each word in the lesson along with the mem you have chosen. You can change or deselect mems as you like.

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‘selecting’ a mem by default doesn’t really have any effect, and other than appearing on your mem list at the end of a session they won’t appear anywhere else on your profile.

It used to frustrate me, I didn’t want to have to ‘select’ a mem just because it was the first one there.

Then the ‘go without a mem’ button came along - an improvement when the mem is so bad I don’t ever want to see it again, but A) it’s more of an effort to click on it and B) when you get an item wrong the mem’s will still come up again.

So my advice is - just ignore mem’s selected by default/accident - it took me a long (cough-years?) time to do this but ultimately it’s easier (and less stressful) than trying to avoid having unwanted mem’s chosen for you.

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I can’t believe I’ve never used the preview feature before. That is awesome, thank you!

Well. That sucks. :disappointed_relieved: I guess I have to come up with something that’s less of an eyesore to look at and switch it out.

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If you’re using the web version, you can hit ESC to go without a mem. If there are no mems, press enter/return.

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And that’s the problem with preview: It shows you everything on the level. If there are a couple of them that are about to be scheduled for review tomorrow, and you haven’t seen them in a few months, that’s a spoiler - you won’t actually know at review time whether you really knew those words or would’ve forgotten them and should deliberately get them wrong to get them scheduled sooner.

It would be great if you could select an individual item to preview, rather than previewing a whole level at a time. Back when Memrise was still taking suggestions from users, I requested this several times, and other people did too. But that’s yet another suggestion they never responded to that I can remember, and ignored for years.

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If you really think that seeing the items you’re learning is a problem, than you should refuse to use Duolingo, Clozemaster, Anki, etc, as well as avoid reading books, watching movies, and listening to podcasts in your target language.

In other words, I do not believe that exposure to items that will soon be up for review interferes with learning them. On the contrary, I believe it’s helpful. The more you expose yourself to the language, the better.

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You misunderstand. It’s not something that inherently interferes with learning, obvious. However, it interferes with the memrise algorithm, which will then mis-schedule things for you, and that mis-scheduling will interfere with learning. Memrise will think you know something you actually don’t know, and then schedule the next review too far into the future. If you’re not actually using that word for real or encountering it in real life, and you only got reminded of it because of a memrise spoiler, that will interfere with your learning.

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No, I didn’t misunderstand; I simply think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill and ignoring the broader goal, which is learning the language. The best way to do that is to maximize your exposure to it.

Let’s assume you saw a word during preview yesterday, and today during a review, you got it right only because you saw it yesterday. You’ve still exercised your active recall.

Let’s also assume you would have gotten it wrong today if you hadn’t seen it yesterday. I still don’t think it matters. The next time it comes up for review, either you’ll know it or you won’t. If you don’t know it, you’ll get it wrong, and the review schedule will reset. Is it really that important whether you get it wrong now and reset the review schedule today versus getting it wrong 6, 12, 24, or 48 days from now? Either way, you’ll learn it eventually!

It’s important to enjoy our learning experience so we spend more time learning. If that means using preview to unselect mems we don’t like, or using Memrise Turbo to speed things up and avoid getting marked wrong for typos, than it’s worth it. Maybe we sacrifice our learning on a few words, but if it means we enjoy our experience and learn more words per day (or per week), than in the long run, we come out ahead.

Perhaps you personally get satisfaction from strictly adhering to Memrise’s SRS algorithm. That’s cool, too! My objection is to your implication that we should all share your priorities, and that if we deviate from them at all, we won’t learn as well. My personal experience with my own learning says otherwise.

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You misunderstand that “exposing yourself to the language” is not the same thing as getting poorly timed memrise spoilers, even though it can seem the same for an individual instance. Memrise is supposed to be, in a way, detecting how well you’re learning, including detecting how much exposure you’re getting to what you’re learning in real life outside of memrise.

If you’re learning a language and actually speaking it, or reading books in it, etc., there are words that will appear there that you have a natural exposure to. In those cases, memrise will detect that you know them and, overall, schedule things appropriately. Yes, there’s a slight chance that some word you hardly ever encounter in real life will appear just before you do a memrise review, just once, and then you won’t see it again for months, and in that case memrise’s algorithm will be fooled and your scheduling won’t be optimal. But that won’t happen much.

The problem with memrise spoilers is that it’s not a coincidence. You’re getting the spoiler because that word is in the memrise course you’re taking. Probabilistically, this will mess up your schedule pretty often, because it’s not a coincidence. It’s not that the word is rare and just happened to pop up, it’s that the word is in the course and popped up because it’s in the course, but it popped up in a way that prevents memrise from being able to learn how well you know it. Memrise is supposes to cause words that are in the course to show up for you, but it’s supposed to pair up that reminder with detection - that is, memrise needs to know, every time it shows you the word, whether you know it now (just before it actually shows you), and how long since you last got tested on it. Preview does an end run around that process.

Perhaps this would be clearer if I used my tropical fish identification course as an example. In it there are fish from various regions of the world. Because of where I live, I go snorkeling or diving in the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico a few times a year, but have never even once made it to the central Indo-Pacific, where many species are based. So, for Atlantic fish, there are a number that I am quite likely to see in person a few times a year, and thus I learn those much better. Some of them I know very very well, due to seeing them in person numerous times. Memrise detects this appropriately, and since I nearly always get those fish right, they stay on a 180-day review schedule.

If I preview a level, I’ll see the Atlantic fish on that level, and also Hawaiian fish (which I may have seen in person but not for over a year), eastern Pacific fish (ditto), and Indo-Pacific and Indian Ocean fish. A few of them are present at the aquarium near me and I have gotten to know them, but various others are not, and I know them only from making this course. If I preview a level, it doesn’t matter which fish I see or know in real life - it’ll show me all of them. If any of those Indo-Pacific fish I barely know come up for review soon, I’ll get them right, they’ll be scheduled for further in the future, and I’ll forget them, because I really needed a sooner review, but memrise doesn’t know that. I fooled it by doing a preview.

What’s significant here is, the reason I got spoilers is because those fish are in the course - that’s why preview showed them to me. Even a very rare fish I might hardly ever see in person, and might take many years to learn well, would show up. It’s not a coincidence, it’s not real life, it’s not something I’m naturally going to learn because it shows up in my life sometimes.

If that happens once, no big deal. It’ll happen on rare occasions with rare real life fish/words, too. But if you use preview, chances are it’ll keep happening, much more frequently than it naturally would. Fish I never see in real life, show up just when I preview. At that point, I might as well be using the “cramming” method of learning, and try to ensure I preview things often to get them to stick in my memory; memrise’s schedule based algorithm is effectively being disabled.