All of a sudden Chinese characters in the official course are appearing with audio. It’s like changing rules amidst the game, especially if you’ve learnt these characters already, and almost impossible to recognize them without pinyin. Listening exercises for characters make no sense.
I think that Chinese course by Memrise is difficult enough, but by adding these audio files you are making it even more difficult. Given the fact it’s not a european language and whatnot, maybe, it should be more lenient learning. Just an opinion.
Hi @RainbowMeow or 彩虹喵 , thanks for sharing this! It might be frustrating to hear but it’s true that currently in our official courses, “English” does refer to “British English” and we actually made the effort to make it sound “British”. This is due to the resources we have. At the moment we cover British English and American English but not other variants yet I understand your point and we’ll do our best to expand to more languages and variants as soon as we can.
Hi @malkeynz, a more flexible marking for pinyin has been rolled out to some of the Android users (not 100% yet) but feel free to update the app in the coming days! iOS is still working in progress but I’ll make sure to keep flagging the importance to our development team and have it implemented soon as well.
Hi @Hombre_sin_nombre, thanks for setting the tone of the message with a head’s up Btw I’m impressed with the number of languages you covered!
The main problem here is that we do have different needs from users who want to learn just pinyin and those who want to learn Chinese characters (the meaning, the sound and the shape) and we are not doing a good job fulfilling the different needs by having one course for everyone. I’m actually working on a plan to improve the Chinese course structure.
I agree with what you said that the Chinese course is difficult but I think it’s more of the course structure’s fault rather than the audios. And I also agree that we should make Chinese learning more lenient overall and that’s why we fixed the character levels (previously it asked you to answer English definitions in tapping tests and you had to answer in a specific order) and also tried to make pinyin marking more flexible (previously you had to put hyphens, spaces etc in a specific order). We’ll keep the improvements going and make our Chinese course more learner friendly!
Spaces don’t matter anymore (on web at least), which is a nice, so thanks for getting that change made.
However now accents are too permissive: I can give my answers the completely wrong tones (I use the Pinyinput input method) and it still marks them as correct. I understand that it needs to cater for people who don’t enter tones at all, but if I’m making the effort to enter tones then it should at least ensure that I’m getting them right. Now the only way to know is to listen to the audio to try and judge if they were in fact correct (which is tricky sometimes). Please change this back to the way it was previously.
Would it be possible to make a Chinese course that makes new words appear as both hanzi and pinyin? Learning Pinyin is great for beginners but down the road not being able to read will cause all sorts of problems!
Hi, I’ve been enjoying learning Mandarin Chinese for a while.
Memrise decided it wanted to start showing me Chinese letters.
But it takes forever with those weird videos trying to somehow visualize the letters. I don’t know if it actually works or not for those who don’t come from east Asia. I’m from Korea and we all had to learn Chinese characters in school. So I don’t need those those videos to help me memorize the Characters. I just need the flashcards and sounds. Some reminders mostly. I understand in China they use simplified versions so I’d have to memorize some more. But I feel like the videos of someone drawing a picture are just unnecessary. Is there any way to turn them off?
It’s kind of useless to show the animation of the character being drawn, only to ask you to select it. It’s right there in front of you so it doesn’t test you.
Greetings, at the very beginning of the Mandarin Chinese 1 course there is a problem, small but annoying. There are two translations: “bu shi” -> “no; not” and “bu” -> “no; not”. When the system asks for translation of “no; not”, there is no way to know if the reply should be “bu” or “bu shi” and only one is accepted.
Hello. I’m nonbinary and use they and them as singular pronouns. (In English, singular “they” came before singular “you”.) Other plural pronouns in the course have (plural) after them in English to demarcate them as such. Every time I encounter “they/them” I have to stop and think a moment, and every time I get a little sad and a little frustrated that you haven’t added “(plural)” to the end.
Could you please add the text “(plural)” after “they/them”? I’m not asking for you to even include whatever a nonbinary singular they would be in Mandarin—I have no idea if that’s a thing yet. I’m just asking for this little demarcation that will help not just me but a lot of people (especially younger people) for whom “they” is not plural in all cases. Thanks.
I’m not sure what changed, but recently, when I do reviews of vocab on the Mandarin course, it’ll provide sounds and ask me to pick a meaning. I will answer, and the characters for the sound will come up in the green correct screen. However, previously, the pinyin would also appear. This is very helpful as I am still making the transition from pinyin to characters. However, now only the characters appear and this effect is not present. Is there any way I can turn on pinyin and characters for the response prompt?
Greetings, at the very beginning of the Mandarin Chinese 1 course there is a problem, small but annoying. There are two translations: “bu shi” → “no; not” and “bu” → “no; not”. When the system asks for translation of “no; not”, there is no way to know if the reply should be “bu” or “bu shi” and only one is accepted.
, thanks for sharing this! It might be frustrating to hear but it’s true that currently in our official courses, “English” does refer to “British English” and we actually made the effort to make it sound “British”. This is due to the resources we have. At the moment we cover British English and American English but not other variants yet 
I understand your point and we’ll do our best to expand to more languages and variants as soon as we can.
Btw I’m impressed with the number of languages you covered!
