For the past few days, the listening skills (purple button) for Japanese 4 has been non-functional. All the other courses are working fine. (Japanese 1-3). I prefer using the purple button for my daily review and not the blue button.
And while this technically isn’t the place, it’s the same bug and in a Memrise developed course. Spanish (Mexico) 5 just did the same thing. Yesterday it was fine. Today listening skills is gone. In the app and on the web site.
Edit: Spanish (Mexico) 3 and 2 also just lost listening skills. I’m guessing there’s some sort of database shifting going on? Maybe?
Hi @slender4,
Could you send me a screenshot of this test? I believe you that it’s real but a screenshot will help me understand where the issue is! Thanks!
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Hi @Digicrest,
Another thing that might be different in the Memrise official Japanese courses is that they are focused on equipping the learners to speak quickly so they have more colloquial than literature languages.
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Good question! This is a slightly advanced concept for learners and may not be appropriate in our courses… but let me explain anyway.
From what I see in the course, the translations for each are following; (do they show like that on your end as well?)
聞きます to ask; to hear; to listen
聴きます to listen (to music)
見ます to look; to see
観ます to watch
The translations show the subtle differences of how the different Kanjis are used. I personally do distinguish them and use different Kanji depending on what I want to say, but some might say that it is not so important. I think it is useful to know the differences fr when you expand your Kanji vocabulary later on.
For example, for “watching sports games” you say スポーツ観戦（かんせん） because you “watch”, or 試聴（しちょう） for when you have a taster listen to Spotify music.
However, since Memrise at the moment (watch this space!) doesn’t have a good place to explain these details, I can understand how it can be unfair to test on these. I will make sure they don’t come up as each other’s distractors in multiple tests.
If you have more suggestions, let me know!
----Reply on your other question (sorry, I couldn’t add it as a separate message since the system doesn’t allow me to comment consecutively------
(This is about the distractors being too obvious and not helpful)
Hi @jklingen9290
I’m sorry for the wait on this, and thank you for your kind patience.
We have plans to regenerate all distractors based on our new algorithm in the coming days. Please bare with us a little longer…
Thank you for the cool suggestion for breaking down the Kanji in the keyboard (have I understood it correctly?). We won’t have enough resources to work on this straight away, but I will definitely consider your idea)
Additionally about disabling the app keyboard, you can actually do this by tapping on the keyboard icon at the top right of the screen (only appears for typing tests). The downside for this is that the system cannot mark your answers correct if you write a Kanji in hiragana even the hiragana themselves might be correct. For example, if you type わたし for 私, the system cannot mark you correct. This is something we are trying to fix as well, but it will take some time I’m afraid.
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Thanks for your reply Kana,
I understand the explanation regarding the kanji.
I saw the update and checked my app. The new distractors algorithm seems to be excellent. I can’t get even get to 50 in the speed round where I was regularly hitting 100 before. Thank you very much.
Regarding the kanji keyboard, I think the fastest and most effective change you could make (if it wasn’t already included in the update) is just to shuffle the characters around each time. The human brain is so good at figuring out patterns that it will look for them anywhere. For example, the Japanese word for emergency has 4 characters. I cannot remember what order they are supposed to go in, but in a typing exercise, it’s easy for me to remember a sequence of 4 buttons. If the keyboard is laid out the same way every time, I will be memorizing the layout and not the contents of the keys. I don’t think breaking kanji into radicals is a good idea, so I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.
I don’t think it’s worth your time to worry about entering with a Japanese input keyboard. Those keyboards usually allow you to convert hiragana into kanji. I haven’t had any trouble inputting with them.
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Just curious, is there any timeline or plans for official Japanese courses after Japanese 7? Thanks!
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There’s no hiragana anymore on some words at Japanese 5. And to make it worse, the new interface don’t allow us to copy the text anymore, so, good luck finding how it’s written just by audio.
In this example, you should be able to know that there’s probably a “う” after よ and probably "い"after せ. I know that at this point (level 5) you should be able to understand Japanese a least a little, but this app should make easier and give us information, not hiding it.
So far, I’m very disappointed with the last changes made by memrise. Where’s the examples? Community courses have a lot of Memories included, but officials courses have none. That don’t make any sense.
And, after Japanese 3, there’s no more “learn with locals” so, Idk anymore what’s the officials course advantages…
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Hi @kristoferjanke,
Thank you for flagging the inconsistencies between items with 私たち and 私達.
They are alternatives for each other, making them both correct.
For better consistency, I have changed all to 私たち, as that is the officially recommended choice for this expression.
These changes will mean that there will be a few items (with this Kanji) that are marked as “new words to learn”. I’m sorry for this inconvenience!
Thanks!
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Hi @Akiho
Good observation 
!
the etymology might be different, but in a practical sense, お世辞 almost always means “fake compliment”.
If you say "お世辞でしょ？(That’s お世辞, right?)”, it will mean “you are just saying that to be nice, aren’t you?”, and if you start your sentence with "これはお世辞じゃないんですけど…”, you are saying “I’m not just saying this to be nice, but…” and pre-marking your following speech as genuine and not a fake compliment. These cultural communications are interesting things to highlight, we will consider putting them in the course somehow in the future. Thanks for highlighting your interest on this!
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Hi @kristoferjanke,
Do you see this on the web or on your app?
There is now a grammar mode that is only available in the apps, and not on the web.
The web also counts the grammar levels as items and there are 3 grammar items to learn in Japanese 0. I’m suspecting those are the hidden 3 items in your 207/210. What do you think?
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Kana,
It was on the web. I tested the grammar items on the app and it progressed, so that was it. Any word on when that will be coming to web, since I do most of my learning on PC?
To add on to this, the words “learned” seem to be impossible to review. It shows that I have 2 (soon to be 3) things to review from Japanese 0, but because grammar review hasn’t been introduced yet, I presume it will just sit there forever telling me I have to review something that I can’t.
Is there any rule governing when to and when not to use the kanji? I noticed that after I asked this, you seem to have almost completely removed the kanji 達 from the course entirely. I was under the impression that 私達 was the proper, correct, and most common way to write it, so is there some kind of rule, or is the use of that kanji just going out of style at the moment?
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Hi @haleosquared,
I’m sorry it took me so long to reply to you. We could not figure out what was causing this, but we finally found out and we are fixing this as we speak. You should be able to see the fix in the coming days if not by the end of today. Thank you!
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Hi @haleosquared,
Thank you for reporting this, it was a bug and it has now been fixed. Please log out and in again to see the changes. Thanks!
Regards and happy learning!
Ángela
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Hi @c95008,
Thank you for the question!
We definitely have plans to expand our courses but we have no set date for when this is happening unfortunately.
Could I also ask you a curious question? What kind of Japanese do you hope to learn or keep on learning?
Japanese can look/sound very different depending on situations. Are you interested in being able to understand novels, anime, manga, or have proficiency at business setting or talking with friends that are the same ages a you…
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Hi @RenatoCron,
Thank you for flagging this. The removal of the furigana was a bug and it will be fixed in the upcoming app update.
Thank you also for sharing your concern about moving the community courses to the new website Decks. We have been trying to maintain both the community courses and the Memrise courses for a long time which have been very expensive for us. It was a very difficult decision for us to split the official and community courses, but otherwise we could’ve have lost both of them. The split will help us focus our resources on the improvement of our courses and the app, and although it is true that the app features are not optimised for learning certain languages like Japanese, that is exactly the reason why we are making the split so that we can make them better. I understand that the announcement of Decks came as a shock and rather a negative one for many people, but I hope you could see what this potentially means for the future progress of Memrise. I personally do care very much about you learners who are aspiring to master the Japanese language, and therefore very excited to know that we will have more development resources to support the Japanese course.
Keep your suggestions for improvement coming, because they always help me understand better what the learners need.
Thank you!
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Hi Kana, Thanks for the reply. 
I’m interested in talking with friends and meeting people while in Japan. And maybe learn some useful language for daily life in Japan. Thanks!
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Ohh, that’s good.
I noticed that the Japanese layout changed, so that must one of the reasons that hiragana disappeared.
But, as you asked for comments, I don’t really like the new layout for Japanese yet. The Kanji/word appearing in that line at the middle of screen, could be a little bigger and the audio button less important.
With the audio button that big, we need to scroll down to see the attributes (furigana, literal translation)
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I’m afraid there is no plan to bring Grammar Levels to the web at this stage, we are first focusing to perfect the features and the courses on the app before we branch out. Please bear with us on this one.
As for the Kanji, there is a guideline for when to use Kanji recommended by the government.
Public documents are supposed to follow this guideline (or even use less Kanji for non-native speakers) and many of the public sign posts follow this as well. In the new Memrise courses (released last November), I have tried to follow this guideline as much as possible.
The suggested guideline and the general trend now is to write it in Kanji only when it has that literal meaning. Some Kanji can mean both abstract and specific thing. For example, the word “時（とき）” literally means “time”. When we literally want to say “time”, as in for example “time will tell”, we write it in Kanji （「時が知らせてくれるでしょう」）. However, in sentences like 「子どものときは、納豆（なっとう）が嫌い（きらい）でした」(“I didn’t like natto when I can a kid”), we write it in hiragana because it means “when” rather than the specific concept of “time”. Same with “事（こと）”, which could be translated to “thing” or “incident”;
- 考え事（かんがえごと）をしています。 I have something on my mind. I am thinking of some thing.
- 聞（き）いたことがあります。 I have heard of that before.
Another guideline of when to write in Kanji or not is; we don’t use Kanji when that is the suffix of the word, which is the case for 「私たち」. Here, 「たち」 is a suffix that adds the meaning of plurality. Where as in 「友達」, it is written in Kanji because it is not a suffix and you cannot separate the word 友達.
Above is the rough guideline, but people still write in a different way. Like you mentioned, there are people who want to use Kanji wherever possible to produce this “proper-ness”. I personally think it increases readability when Kanji is used differently according to the context.
Hope this helps! and thank you for reading this massive reply!
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Thank you @RenatoCron for the feedback, yes I agree we have room to improve this screen to bring better focus on the right element of what you are learning. This is not the final stage of the app, so prepare yourself for future surprises!
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