Thanks for highlighting this! It should be fixed now. 
The testing direction was incorrect (it was testing German from English instead of Plural from German).
no problem! thanks for replying to this so quickly haha
Hey Sherrin! Was learning the course halfway and it suddenly disappeared?
I can’t seem to find the course on memrise anymore, it keeps telling me that the page doesn’t exist 
is this a bug or hv you deleted the course?
It seems the course was deleted by Memrise as I did not delete it. I didn’t even notice it was gone because I’ve not been actively revising it.
I do not know when it happened because I did not receive an email from Memrise about the deletion (and I just checked my inbox again to be sure).
If I had to guess it might have been the publisher who probably requested it to be removed? Could @MemriseSupport confirm this, and explain why there wasn’t even a message sent to inform me of this?
Oh nos, I see! It got deleted last night suddenly whilst I was still using the course!
Really sorry that Memrise just deleted your course without notifying you thank you for your efforts tho!!! Hope that they will give you an answer soon.
Hi,
If you can no longer find this course, it’s likely that it’s been deleted due to copyright infringement.
Please note that courses containing copyrighted material are not allowed on Memrise. If a course has been reported as infringing on someone’s copyright, we will remove the course in question. We are not required to inform the course creator.
Please see our terms of use for more information: https://www.memrise.com/terms/, section 8, Posting Information and User Content.
I hope this clears any confusion.
Best wishes,
Memrise team
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I contacted Memrise to ask them why this course had disappeared and why they had neither informed the author nor the participants that they would delete this course. The response they sent me is what they have duplicated here.
Memrise has behaved poorly in this instance and hid behind Terms and Conditions. It is reasonable therefore not to trust this company. I would not trust subscribing to their paid membership … even though in the past I have paid a years subscription. They have a long way to go to understand customers.
Secondly, the assertion of copyright is nebulous in any sense here. Academic works that build on other works are not infringing copyright. Memrise might have buckled against the company that asserted this claim but it should have thought carefully about the wider implications. Presumably, the publisher Cornelsen has initiated this. And so it is also a despicable company and has served an own goal. The reason people came here was because they were using the book in a course. So actually this Memrise course helped Cornelsen - pity that they don’t see that! I will immediately delete all Memrise courses that use Cornelsen as a reference and will not recommend this publisher to anyone. I recommend all people to use a different German text book for A1. Hueber and Klett produce better material.
I thank Sherrin for all the work she did in putting together this A1 course. It helped me a great deal in learning German. And clearly it has helped many many people over many years. Thank you so much for sharing - you are a very kind and generous soul.
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Thank you @bitflip. I created this course back in 2016 when I was taking a course in university that used this Cornelsen book. Back then, I was actively using Memrise for learning vocab for the different languages I am learning, so it was only natural for me to create this course on the Memrise platform.
Since this was something that I did many years ago, and it has outlived its usefulness for me, I am not very upset by this move. I feel more for the people who were actively using this course, especially to learn for their respective courses.
I didn’t expect Memrise to give any reply to my post more than a stock reply, because my expectations from them have sunk ever so lower since I started using the site actively back in 2015. With all their stunts, one after another (which included making the learning experience worse, and numerous bugs to the point where I started to be afraid to update my app, and ignoring the community at large), I have learnt not to expect anything. By this point I’m not angry; I’ve come to accept it.
It is also a pity if the publisher indeed chose to act this way, but I cannot fault them too. Maybe for them, they saw this free list as a threat because they chose to sell the vocabulary list as a separate booklet (which I had to buy for my course of study too in addition to the textbook).
I am thankful that I learnt to use Anki for most of my vocab learning now, so I do not have to rely on Memrise anymore. For anyone who is serious about creating your own content, I highly recommend giving Anki a try. For learners too, their SRS algorithm cannot be beaten. However, right now, I do not have the time to make the course into an Anki deck that everyone can use, especially with the audio.
For those who were using the course, I have uploaded the following to this Google drive, also linked above, which I hope can help you:
- The Excel file I used to create the course on Memrise (uploaded last time as requested)
- The zip folder of what I believe are the original audio files I uploaded to Memrise. However note that this was the very first draft, and so any mistakes would not have been corrected, and will not include any audio from Memrise. I think audio for Einheit 1-3 is in the “German_old” folder.
- A folder containing the downloaded course from Memrise using a script I wrote (I did this back in 2019). It’s similar to the Excel, but it’s a CSV flattened out and you have all the columns as it was stored in Memrise, along with level information. However, I do not have all the audio (re)downloaded from Memrise, so ignore the audio column because the file names will not match.
Finally, I have Quizlet sets for Einheit 7-12 (only). If you are interested, PM me. The original sets were created by my ex-classmate back in 2016. She didn’t take to Memrise, and so for the last few units, she made the cards on Quizlet instead of using this course. (Who knew it would come in handy so many years later?)
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Perhaps, you are not required to inform users by the letter of the law, but in spirit it would do you no harm and won’t take a lot of your precious time.
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Hi all,
Thank you for your feedback and sorry to hear you feel let down regarding the course creator not being informed about the action to remove this course.
We will take this into consideration when we need to remove courses in the future, however please note that this can sometimes include the removal of many courses at once and that not all users have given us the permissions to contact them. We would also like to take the chance to highlight again that creating courses containing copyrighted material is in breach of our terms, which are agreed to by the user at sign up.
Kind regards,
Memrise team
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It is difficult to me see how the course created by Sherrin was infringing copyright. She produced all the translations by herself and added audio as well. It is difficult to see how this is different from the majority of the 3rd party language courses on Memrise (other than the fact that Sherrin did a great job). Most of us use these courses to supplement the relevant books.
Memrise acted in a ham fisted way (and I notice Memrise’s classic non-apology “sorry to hear you feel let down”) that just underlines Memrise’s attitude towards customers and the standard of its customer service.
Anyway it is for Memrise to do what Memrise wishes. The message to me is don’t subscribe to Memrise - without let or hinderance they will delete any course they arbitrarily decide violates copyright. The reason they deleted this course can be applied to every single 3rd party course that supplements or complements a book.
Beware folks.
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Dear Sherrin,
I’ve been using your creation for a while and I was very pleasant with it, until just a short while later I found that it was disappeared. I also have purchased Memrise with the hope that I could see your work again but sadly it didn’t work until today that I see this post. I do appreciate your work a lot. I wonder if I could have also the parts that you haven’t uploaded yet in the shared drive?
I would willing to say thanks to you for more than what I can just say here, so please inbox me at [email protected].
To Memrise and Cornelsen: I have bought all the copyrighted published of Studio21 A1, A2, B1, B2 that we must buy when we started the course. Please don’t blame students for sharing learning material that you didn’t offer us. I believe no one would want this course unless they are learning YOUR course. This should have been your work to help us instead of behaving poorly to Sherrin.
Cheer