Japanese 1-3 seems very different depending on your language being american or British English, i’m wondering which one i should take? Because they seem to teach in different ways.
The below is the current one, the other one is not updated anymore.
Greetings !
I’m writing here as there is something I don’t understand. I started recently the japanese 1 course from memrise in french “Japonais 1”.
I was a bit confused when I started learning kanji without having seen all hiragana. So I checked and it seems I have some levels missing, or more exactly, they are not taken into account.
I’ve made some screenshots, for instance, the level 2 do not appear :
https://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=467272Memrise1.png
I don’t know if I am missing something here or maybe it is due to the language choice.
Thanks for reading
Level 2 is also missing in the similar course for English speakers.
When levels are missing on the web (in the official courses), it is usually a sign that there is a chatbot level. If you open the course on the app, you should see them. (Though it will have to be a recent version of the app)
Note: Not sure if you need Pro or not to use them.
Hey guys,
the Hiragana signs for “sa” and “ri” are each different in the mobile app and browser version. Why is that? Is it a bug? Which is correct?
Thanks,
Marie
might be because the browser uses a duifferent character set
notnecesarily because of memrise itself
Hi everyone
I’ve been enjoying memrise and using it to refresh my Japanese. I’ve done some courses in real life, but it’s been about ten years ago. I’ve noticed some things that didn’t feel quite right:
- In the first level you learn next words:
“Ikou!”, “Oyasumi” and “Choushi wa dou?”
If i’m not mistaken these are rather informal ways of saying “Let’s go!”, “Goodnight” and “How are you?”
Wouldn’t it be better to teach the more formal “Ikimashou!”, “Oyasuminasai” and “Anata no choushi wa dou desu ka?”
- The hiragana for te (て) is written as “tse”. I’ve never seen it this way before. Also the hiragana を is written as “o”. I know this isn’t wrong, but there was a question in which I had two times option “o”. One of the “o”'s was probably connected to お. Maybe it would be better to write the を as “w(o)”?
Anybody else had these “issues?”
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i also think wo should be wo
I think it’s better to start with the base forms of words rather than jumping straight into polite speech. When I started learning Japanese, the tool I was using gave me polite speech immediately and this later gave me a poor grasp of grammar. Thankfully, I found Tae Kim’s grammar guide to fix some misconceptions.
But I never liked dealing with romaji. “te” and “wo” are definitely better if you ask me.
The romaji issue only exists in the old no longer updated version of the course, you should use the current one.
Well, if you’re British/from the Commonwealth then use British. If you’re American then use the American one.
If you are not American or British I guess choose randomly? I doubt anyone will have tried both.
But the British course is good!
In the Japanese 2 course for english speakers (the one with kanji, not the one with furigana only) there might be a problem in the 4th level:
The verb “wakarimasu” appears in furigana instead of kanji. It should be 分かります, but it appears only in hiragana 「わかります」。
Latin letters can be written in different ways, for example with different fonts, with different styles (say, italics), handwritten letters may look different from printed ones. But you can still recognize that this and this and this all represent the same letter - “A”.
It’s similar with Japanese script. There are different fonts. Some hiragana look a bit different when written by hand compared to their printed forms, and so on. So there’s no “correct” form, as long as the character is readable. The differences between what you see in the browser and on the mobile app is probably caused by different fonts and settings on the two devices.
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Hi @88Timothy,
Thank you for letting us know about that error. We have now corrected it in the course, and the new audio will be ready shortly as well!
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Hello @DrBooom,
Thank you for getting in touch with us with your question. As @jimnicholson has mentioned, the seemingly missing levels are where the chatbots are placed. If you are learning on your phone, in replacement of Level 2, you will see the chatbot “Introduction”. Same with level 7, 9 or 13. But I totally understand how you find the jump from hiragana only to suddenly being shown many kanjis a bit dramatic. We are actually planning to redesign that part of the course in the near future to make the introduction of kanjis more gradual. We should let you know when that happens, so look out for notification!
Happy learning!
Kana
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Hello @Engelschnecke,
Thank you for getting touch with us with your question. Yes, @henning.kockerbeck explained it for us, and the differences you see are due to the font used on different platforms. They are both correct, so you don’t have to worry about remembering the wrong characters. But I understand that it is confusing. We will in the future consider adding mems to make it clearer. Thank you so much for your input!
Happy learning!
Kana
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Hi @RiccardoMoro65,
Thank you for your question! It is great to hear that you chose Memrise to relearn Japanese!
I hate to reply with a question, but could you tell me which course you are referring to in your 2nd point (about て and を?). “Tse” especially looks like something we need to correct immediately!
I checked in the Memrise official course, but could not locate the items that fit your description.
Thank you very much!
Kana
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Hi @JJ_or_Jemima,
The American version of the current British course should be uploaded soon. We hope to be as quick as possible on this so that everyone can access the updated courses 
Thank you!
Kana
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Hi @Jone_Samsa,
Thank you for your suggestion!
Actually, quite a few of us Japanese people also write 「わかります」, so I won’t say this is incorrect. But since you get to see the hiragana in a different column anyway, maybe we can write it in Kanji here so that you can learn the kanji as well. Thank you for your suggestion!
What you have to be careful is that わかります can be written in different kanjis (分かります、解ります、判ります） and they mean slightly different things. For example,
分かります：駅への行き方が分かりません。：I don’t understand (close to “know”) how you get to the station.
解ります：このマシンの仕組みが解りません：I don’t understand how this machine works.
But it’s also true that fewer and fewer people are being strict about these differences nowadays.
Thank you for your input!
Happy learning!
Kana
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