For new memrise users or people who are new to the forum and haven’t seen this before, if you’re using memrise on the web you can use a script to disable the timer:
Try it! Chances are you’ll have a far superior memrise experience. If you decide you like the timer, you can disable the script and get the timer back, but lots of people prefer memrise with no timer. I’ve been using memrise without the timer for years and would never go back to timed memrise.
I think that being timed gets you thinking quicker and on the point so that your brain is more active that is why I like the timer that is how I learn but thank you anyway
@edm1234 that might be true for “normal” vocabulary. But the timer made me almost ditch the morse code course because there was just not enough time to listen to the audio (I needed to listen more than once). The app (with no timer issues) helped me stay on track with this one. Also having to type with a different keyboard (like Urdu for example) takes more time than the timer allows, so it would be nice to have the choice of using or losing it.
There are all sorts of courses that become impractical or impossible with the timer.
Sentences and phrases; even if they’re short enough you can usually enter them barely in time, there’s no time to double check for typos so you keep getting things wrong even if you know them.
Typing in a foreign language that takes longer to enter
Audio prompt courses; often it takes an extra few seconds for the audio to start playing, and often it takes some listening time before you know what to answer.
A course where you’re both learning words or phrases in a foreign language, and learning to read an unfamiliar alphabet, so you both take a bit of extra time just for the basic reading and then you try to remember what it means, which slows you down
Courses that involve puzzles, where you’re supposed to think a little bit about each one, or it might fool you.
That’s just one of the reasons the timer is so bad - that some courses just take more time and the timer doesn’t adjust. There are other reasons, that apply even to simple vocabulary courses, but those aren’t what this comment is about
the timer is not bad per se: you don’t like it - you’re absolutely entitled to dislike it, of course, but that is something else
Without the timer memrise makes no sense for me - even in courses asking to type in sentences (except for Japanese, there both the bar side and the timer are a disaster)
I’m not sure how it works with audio prompt, but I’ve noticed that with image prompts, the timer doesn’t start until the picture is downloaded and displayed.
Audio samples often start with a couple seconds of silence, or some pre-sound before the sound you actually need, so memrise can’t tell when to actually start the timer. Of course to be really analogous to what it does with images, it would have to wait to start the timer until the entire audio sample has played, since it doesn’t know how much of it you need to hear to know the answer; in a language course, you will often need to hear the whole thing before you can answer.
The timer is absolutely horrible when typing in Cyrillic for the Russian course. Has made me generally avoid using Memrise on the web bc its such a cluster.
