This is probably none of my business, but what I don’t particularly like so far in the new version of Memrise is, that both the Immersion and Communication sections have their content stored on the servers of other companies (YouTube and OpenAI, respectively).
Firstly, of course, it is just inconvenient from my personal standpoint, as the ChatGPT is unavailavle in my country, and Youtube is going to be sooner or later closed too, so I cannot use the chat right now and won’t have access to the most of your videos in the future.
But, on a more general level, I had an impression that Memrise is aspiring to become more self-sufficient these days, so they might be considering their own corporate media storage solutions at least some day.
I have the habit of keeping track of my learning on Memrise by manually copy-and-pasting the words that I’ve learnt to a Word file, including words from official and community courses. After the mandatory migration of official courses to the new interface, will I still be able to access the word lists like now?
I no longer work at Memrise as myself and a significant proportion of staff were cut as Memrise tries to staunch significant financial losses, so tagging me won’t get you anywhere going forward.
To your question I don’t know what you mean by a word list. But just go use the new experience and have a look, you can come back with 2 clicks.
As much as i looked forward to this, it is fatally flawed. Portuguese ( Portugal ) has many errors. “Sao dez para as quinze” is being translated as , it is ten to three . This is just one example but there are many
Leadership is clearly too headstrong to realize what is not working.
Here is what is killing the franchise:
Incompetence
Leadership lacks self awareness. There was once a developer here named Matt that called himself ‘Batman’ for some reason. He took it so far, he even made batman prompts on the app. I think he was even responsible for changing the color scheme to this horrendous gold, dark blue pattern. Memrise used to look rad (could someone post a screenshot of the OG memrise?)
They treat their strength(s) as a weakness. The power of Memrise was the community. The community courses were once accessible on the mobile app. They removed community courses from the phone app. Well … if people are downloading the app from the playstore and all they see now are generic in-house Memrise courses, there is nothing keeping them enticed to stay. Generic language apps are a dime and a dozen. What makes Memrise great is that the user created courses go much deeper in depth, especially with vocabulary.
Memrise should stop focusing on teaching languages in-house and let the community do that for them. Bring back memes. Allow users to rate courses.
I agree that Community courses offer additional language experience (some created by MemRise staff).
They also offer many other interesting and useful subjects - a very good reason to stay with MemRise. (I have for over 10 years and several longer than that.)
In addition to offering an easy link to Community created courses (even with a disclaimer if they wish), an easy link to the Forum, on the App, are my greatest wish.
This is exactly what I’ve always been afraid of. I do sincerely hope they make it, but looking back at what happened over the years and seeing how much they probably invested in the latest version, seeing that it’s probably still a good way from being market-ready and also noting that “the new stuff” is really just a different way of presenting old (and too often faulty!) content, I doubt that they can stand up to the competition. A competition that they really wouldn’t have to face if they would have utilized their unique points of sale. Maybe someone does finally realise that their biggest assets lie in the community courses and mems.
I also never really understood as to why you would give away the product freely, i. e. with only minor tradeoffs. A lifetime sub (if still available) costs somewhere around £120 if I’m not mistaken, that’s a bargain.
I bet the by far greater share of users are not paying for the product, which is rather sad.
Memrise has raised about $25 million across its seed, Series A, and Series B funding rounds. The company currently generates annual revenue at the low eight-figure level.
That’s an interesting article, thanks for sharing! I haven’t yet come across Steve Toy. Interestingly, he speaks about himself as → “the guy who has worked at Memrise” even though his → LinkedIn profile identifies him as Memrise’s CEO (obviously since 06/2021).
Maybe the article as well as the above cited sources are already water under the bridge.
RE the money: we’ve all seen companies waste money big time and still fail to meet their goals. If Memrise have financial problems, they might have just done that.
Whatever applies: taking James’ last posting, the staff has been significantly reduced which explains why @MemriseSupport hasn’t posted anything in almost 3 months now (at least someone obviously logged in with that account yesterday).
