To translate разногласие with “problem” is not only plain wrong in German but also in most other languages. After Finishing with Russian I won’t use this app for the next language. Enough is enough. Not only has memrise messed up the new “design”, the “deck thing”, the “grammar bot”, the last winning game, the leaderboard, ziggy and mostly anything else they ever put their hands on, but now even more I see that even the translations are not properly done. I pay very little per year but yet this is already too much. There are way better designed apps out there.
@pavel70: could you please check what @FlorianDAcquisto wrote? There really is quite a few wrong words, I’d suggest you plan some time to check across all your courses!
I’ve also come across bunches of errors in other courses (DE-FR, DE-ES, EN-NL, to only name a few). This seems to be a general problem and it really is quite annoying.
And unless one already has some previous knowledge, you won’t ever know until you use it and score some laughs at best …
Don’t be too hard, we all make mistakes!
I must say that today’s quiz question was wrong here too (it asked me to translate something supposedly in Dutch which was actually an English phrase), but hey, we all. learn from our mistakes.
Try to be a bit more patient and amiable, please. It won’t do you bad.
Iam patient with people why would I be patient with a company I’m paying for a course that has been created years ago and still includes so many mistakes? Also if you organize a winning game then at least do the vocabulary part right if you offer a vocabulary program. Jesus, why even justifiying…
@FlorianDAcquisto @Olaf.Rabbachin
Could you explain what’s wrong with “Ich habe Hunger”? I don’t speak German, but isn’t it the same construction as in Spanish “Tengo hambre”?
Yes, “ich habe Hunger” means “I’m hungry” or “tengo hambre”.
“Я хочу есть” would rather translate to “ich möchte (etwas) essen” or “quiero comer (algo)”.
This kind of “neglect” can be seen across all the Memrise courses I took.
@pavel70: are you reading this at all?
@Olaf.Rabbachin , @Hombre_sin_nombre
Thank you for your comments and active revision of our courses. In this case “я хочу есть” is the set Russian expression for “Ich habe Hunger” or “I’m hungry” , which indeed literally means “I want to eat”. We deliberately teach language in relation to natural expression in your native language, giving the literal translation only in the presentation card. This approach helps you to understand how set expression work and are used in the language you are learning rather than memorising every word of the expression.
Please let me know if you have any more questions and suggestions.
Best regards,
Pavel
Hi Pavel and thanks for getting back to us! I know that you usually provide the literal translation and I can live with that for most of the time.
However, may I kindly point out that there are many occurrences where this really doesn’t fit, resp. where it’s rather confusing. One example comes into my mind right away: “вы принимаете карты?” (DE-RU #3, L2) which you translate to “kann ich mit Karte zahlen?”. “Akzeptieren Sie Karten?” would be the literal and more than equally valid translation. It just doesn’t make much sense IMHO to use a different wording.
Another example (DE-RU #3, L9): “я плохо себя чувствую” is translated as “ich fühle mich nicht gut”. Why the negation? The sentence clearly translates to “ich fühle mich schlecht/krank”!?
While all of the above is a bit confusing, the errors that are found throughout your courses are more than disturbing. Here’s an example from the DE-ES course (#6, L5): “la morada es tuya” which you translate to “das Lilane ist deins” (see this post). It took me weeks to understand that this is about the colour purple (“Lila”) - I haven’t ever heard anybody say that, it’s probably some regional dialect. Instead one would rather say “das Lilafarbene”. There’s other postings in the thread that depict the confusion.
Another example (DE-ES #6, L1): “no tenía la intención de” is translated as “er hat es nicht mit Absicht gemacht”. How on earth could that be a valid translation? It translates to “er hatte nicht die Absicht zu …”!
I could go on with this ad infinitum. I’m sure I see the error >80% of all times, but I recall having learned (DE-IT #2, L1) that “eccoti qui” means “thank you” (as in “here you are”) which was later corrected to “da bist du ja!”, but that was ages after I learned that course and the expression stuck a long time.
Thinks like that wouldn’t happen if you’d be more thorough and/or responsive here on the forums - some corrections require ages until you guys react, that really is unacceptable.
Last but not least: this posting took me >30min due to research. I do this in my spare time with nothing but the expectation to be heard and to find someone to fix things that I can’t fix myself. The responsiveness of your team is so bumpy - sometimes it only takes an hour, sometimes it takes a week. Many times there’s no reaction at all (other than account-related problems handled by @MemriseSupport).
What’s the matter? Isn’t there a team with some amount of time dedicated to support users here on the forum? I’m afraid I just don’t get it.
Hi Olaf, @Olaf.Rabbachin
I’ve recently been diligently working through the first five official Memrise ‘German for English speakers’ courses (German 1, 2 etc.).
I was wondering if you know if these courses are worth doing, or if they contain similar issues? I don’t want to spend time learning bad German.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thank you, - Ian.
Hi Ian,
I took a look at German 1 (sorry, I really can’t do that for all 7 courses! 
) and the quality is generally quite good (as goes with all Memrise courses which is why I learn them)!
There’s the usual inconsistencies as mentioned further up. I found two in DE #1:
- L11: “es ist leider nichts mehr frei” <-> “unfortunately, the restaurant is full”
There is no mentioning of a restaurant at all, I’d translate that as “unfortunately, we’re booked up” (direct translation: “unfortunately, nothing is free anymore”). - L17: Same goes with “komm, ich zeig’ dir die Stadt!” <-> “let me show you the city!”. I’d rather translate the German expression with “come, I’ll show you the city!”.
Unfortunately, you can’t see the additional columns in the level-view, so I can’t check as to whether the word-by-word/direct translation gives you a hint at least.
Interestingly, the sentence that I have stumbled over in probably any course is translated correctly here:
“können wir mit Karte bezahlen?” <-> “can we pay by card?”. 
1 Like
Hi Olaf,
Thanks very much for looking at this - I didn’t expect you to make such a deep dive on this, but I appreciate it!
From what you say, it appears that the German phrases you mention are correct but some of the English translations could be better. For my purposes, I think that’s O.K. - my main concern was learning German phrases that contain errors, and that’s clearly not the case here.
Thanks again for your commentary on this.
1 Like
Hi @ian_mn,
You will rarely see errors in official courses, at least not in the early courses because they are the most widely used ones. Thank to this higher exposure, there is a much higher chance that users will detect such mistakes.
While I greatly appreciate Olaf’s effort into reviewing DE#1, his analysis is by far incomplete, especially since this course has been reworked rather recently (about 2 years ago or so), which is definitely not the case for later courses. Almost inevitably, errors are more frequent in the later courses.
I will not point out mistakes I’ve seen because this topic is about Russian (not German) and because it does not really matter anyway. Any learning material may or may not contain mistakes. Pure and simple. All I can say is that the overall quality of German courses is great. Das ist alles was zählt, nicht?
Some may say the quality of German courses is better than Russian, but there is a strong bias due to the fact that many German sentences can be translated word by word in English (and vise versa) without losing its meaning. This is clearly not the case with Russian. For instance a very simple phrase such as ich habe Hunger (DE) is straightforward to translate in practically every European language: tengo hambre (ES) / j’ai faim (FR) / ho fame (IT) etc., even the English I am hungry is very close. While there is a roughly equivalent construction in Russian: я голоден, it rather means I am starving. The Russian course encourages to use я хочу есть (literally: I want to eat) because this is a much more natural way of expressing this feeling for a native speaker. Actually, the former RU#1 course suggested я голоден and it was replaced by я хочу есть in the reworked RU#1 from last year.
Fun fact, German also has a translation that involves the verb sein (literally: to be), which is ich bin hungrig. I am not a native German speaker, yet this phrase sounds very weird to me. I’m fairly certain German people use ich habe Hunger pretty much all the time, e.g. before lunch.
2 Likes
Whether it’s old courses or new, there’s no guarantee. At the moment I see a lot of mistakes and typoes in RU-IT courses with thousands of people studying them. It’s better to double check every questionable translation.
For instance, che schifo! is translated as Фигово, however correct translation is Какая гадость!/How disgusting! Distrust and verify.
2 Likes
You are indeed right that it can happen. My point is still valid: earlier courses (e.g. RU#1 vs. RU#2) and more recent reworks have less mistakes. Also, thanks to exposure, English->Russian courses probably contain less mistakes than e.g. Italian->Russian courses.
2 Likes
Hi vincoof, thank you for taking the time to respond in such detail.
I’ve decided to abandon working on the official ‘German for English speakers’ courses because, as a basic learner, I would inevitably end up learning most of the errors you mention.
I’m sorry if my message was misleading @ian_mn. All courses may have mistakes. Some errors are more impactful than others. I have not seen any big mistake in the German courses so far. I have mostly seen things that could be taught slightly differently, and most of them are of personal preference I guess.
For example ready (EN) is sometimes translated as bereit (DE) or fertig (DE) in the Memrise courses, and I’m sad that these courses fail to tell the difference between these two translations. But to be fair, neither should they. We need to immerse ourselves through different content in order to better understand when we should use some words and when we shouldn’t.
If I was asked whether the Memrise German courses are good for beginners, I would definitely answer yes. They are well crafted. They are easy to follow. Most native speakers do speak clearly, and even when they’re not crystal clear, their weird pronunciation is definitely useful to train our ear.
1 Like
Hi @vincoof, thank you for the follow-up comments.
I’ve now made a firm decision to switch to other learning methods, at least for the next few months. I don’t want to take any risks.
I’m impressed by the “Easy German” channel on YouTube, and they offer access to PDF transcripts for a dollar per month - so I’ll probably head down that route.
I think I’ll also buy the series of Easy Reader books by Brian Smith. I’ve just listened to some of his corresponding mp3 downloads and they seem accurate and very useful.
What I wanted to carry over is that the quality of the official Memrise courses is actually quite good, even with those mistakes. I just happen to be quite disappointed about the fact that there’s errors in the courses and these do not get fixed as the Memrise team is often all too reluctant and unresponsive.
Like in this case - @pavel70 hasn’t participated in the discussion over the last 4 days and I don’t know what could be the matter.
All that said, I don’t see any reason as to why you should abandon the course. You’ll stumble over errors pretty much anywhere, and - for most of the time - you should be able to recognize them.
Fun fact: the erroneous words/phrases that I’ve come across (both in official and community courses) tend to stick way better because I know that there’s something wrong! 
1 Like
„the errors that are found throughout your courses are more than disturbing.“
„The responsiveness of the team…“
THIS! Together with this Pavel guy obviously ignoring the remarks of a customer (me) will definitely have me cancelling my subscription after I’ll be done with Russian 7. I’ll use Babbel for my next language and hopefully they don’t do the same stupid mistakes (providing wrong translations, trying to even justify them and ignoring their customers).
Трудность is not „Herausforderung“ 