To be 100% clear, you can hop onto Early Access and then come back, it’s not a permanent switch, so please do go and have a look around, you’re not committing to anything.
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It’s a sad day, of course. Your team did everything possible to destroy Memrise which was dear to so many people. This scenarios BS looks absolutely unappealing.
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My phone is android. Is there a newer version for it? When I go to manage apps, I don’t see a prompt to update.
the latest android version is 2023.05.25. You should be able to update it if you go to the app listing in the play store.
But don’t worry too much, worst case you won’t have the sync functionality on android yet, but you could either sync from the website by moving to early access from the web and then open the android app, or you can sync later when the android app updates.
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Thank you, James. This is fine with me, especially inasmuch as I’m already using external supplements/complements to Memrise such as the Chinese Grammar Wiki.
BTW, brilliant idea to build upon GPT-3 to create a practice-bot for language-learning!
I also like your team’s idea of teaching/learning vocabulary by situation or context, which is conceptually a significant step ahead of my notion to start learning vocabulary by category.
One thing I hope will carry over from Memrise Classic to Early Access/Memrise 2023 is the sense of humor in some of the content and some of the choices offered for answers.
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On the Learn page of Early Access, some of the topic tiles have a light-gray background and others have a yellowish background. What does that indicate?
The orange starred scenarios are for subscribers only.
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Is there anyone who also has a bunch of courses (neatly ordered for daily access) with a mix between official and community courses, using the Android app?
The order of my course list is quite important to me and as much as I’d like to check out “Early Access”, I’m afraid it’ll break the order of my courses when going back to classic view.
Anyone care to report about their experience so far …?
Greetings from a coward. 
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I went into and out of EA, just to see it. Everything is fine with my list, but I did not try exercises.
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I gave it a couple of tries over the last few days. Note that I have only used this on Android so far.
Here’s what I like:
- you can now do (speed) reviews across all official courses for a given language; all languages that I worked on are found in the list
- although I have only done a quick session I do thik that the chatbot sessions/scenarios can be quite helpful to improve writing skills
- items have now been categorised which can help focus on a particular area of interest (or review it)
Here’s what I don’t like so much:
- there doesn’t seem to be a streak or anything like a goal along with XP/points that help you achieve your goals
- there are no leaderboards
- reviewing on Early Access will also reset the up for review flag on Classic, but you won’t get any points and will thus lose your streak on Classic if you don’t watch out
- Speed Review sessions seem to be based on an earlier version of Classic. This brought back the very appalling transition/animation between two items; also, when you get an item wrong, it’ll be gone way too fast.
Along with the last update there seem to have also been changes to the Classic Android version:
- leaderboards now only show 20 (instead of 100) entries
- in the course list, the *Learn a new course" button is again at the very top (see → this thread for more info)
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- shortened definitions in speed reviews. In some cases impossible to see notes about duplicates.
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EDITED - part of reply moved.
I hope the non linking of streaks is only a temporary thing until it’s fixed or we no longer have the much liked courses 1 to 7.
items have now been categorised which can help focus on a particular area of interest (or review it)
This however is a great idea.
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To me that’s quite a bugger! However, this thread is about Early Access, so I went ahead and created a new thread for this:
As mentioned in my admittedly very long post at the top, Streaks will be implemented before we make Early Access mandatory. And we have plans or further ways to monitor and incentivise your progress.
But we aren’t going to copy the existing points and leaderboards as they’re about as robust as a North Korean election.
Regarding speed review, i have raised the wrong answer experience is poor, but i can’t see any issue with transitions, it seems identical on my device between the new and old versions, what are you seeing that is so bad?
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Forgive me James if you have stated this already or have replied about it.
I really like “Learn with Locals” (LwL) and find the Italians generally speak clearly and slowly.
However I have struggled with the French (as I’ve reported elsewhere) and I am not sure if I can either now (in Classic) or in the future set a particular LwL phrase not to reappear (eg ignore or ‘already know’).
Someone else like Olaf may reply first 
Thanks
PS
The answer to ‘at present’ (ie in Classic) is to set ‘ignore’ when shown the list of LwL words reviewed.
In other words it can not be done at the time (as one can with the Classic text review mode).
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There’s two notable changes between Classic and Early Access Speed Reviews:
- when starting a SR session, the background during the countdown in EA is a grey to black (or the other way around) color gradient while, in Classic, it’s plain black
- in Classic, the app will quickly slide an answered task away and the next one then comes into view; in EA however, the item “moving away” is being hidden just before the transition which is quite distracting/annoying
Both the gradient background and the transition were once present in Classic as well, hence my assumption that SRs under EA might be based on an older version.
EDIT: note that I had created a separate thread about these differences (see 3 postings further up). You might want to move yours and my posting to said thread in order to not further pollute this thread here (as we both know I myself can’t do this anymore ) …
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As far as i know there has never been a way to ignore a word in a particular learning mode, if you ignore a word it is ignored for all of them.
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Sorry James, I perhaps wasn’t clear.
I’m happy to ignore words or phrases in any mode if I struggle with the audio.
My point was in normal testing one can ignore an item at the time but not when being tested on audio in LwL.
But one can (only) ignore an item at the end of the session in LwL (providing one remembers which phrase it was ).
So I wondered if this has been amended in the Early Access version.
Here are two screen shots of Classic review.
One at the time of hearing it and the other after getting it wrong.
And
But a good point about if I ignore it in LwL then I won’t be tested on it in other modes (which I don’t want to happen).
Perhaps I’ll just have to learn it 
.
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We don’t have a separate Learn with Locals mode in Early Access. You will hopefully be overwhelmed with videos in the immerse tab, and the Membot will speak to you as it sends a message so it didn’t seem necessary to build a LwL mode.
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I somehow managed to completely overread this …
Generally, it’s probably very hard (if not impossible) to find reasonable metrics for comparing something like learning success, general progress, dedication or whatever between people, simply because there are so many factors involved (some learn quicker than others, some topics or languages are harder than others, this list could be continued ad infinitum).
When I look at Duolingo, there’s a zillion ways to quickly harvest XP if you’re inclined to do so, but possibly at the cost of learning not much or even nothing during the process.
Here on Memrise, there have probably always been courses that only serve for harvesting points. You could also create your own private course and learn nothing but earn many pointless points.
Do I care? No. Because I bet the vast majority is really learning.
Regarding motivation in general, comparing yourself to others is IMHO a very important motivator - for instance, think of courses created by teachers and geared at their pupils - there’s a ton of those!
Also, learning is a process where motivation is probably the single one major asset that makes people keep at it. Apart from intrinsic factors such as discipline and dedication anyway.
Streaks and competition are such motivators!
As to why your leaderboards might be “about as robust as a North Korean election”: I disagree.
Yes, Memrise also has different ways to earn points - speed reviews being the quickest and typing answers being the slowest (unless one just repeatedly clicks the hint-button). But still, leaderboards do show the dedication of the people learning resp. working through a course along with you.
I haven’t known Memrise from the start, but for around 6 years now and how points were earned used to be different.
If you ask yourself why it is like that, my personal opinion is that it’s the same as with many areas of Memrise: efficiency, options, variability and whatnot have continuously been taken away or simply degraded.
A very simple example: on Android, you used to be granted 50p for correctly “speed reviewing” an item and (up to) 150p for a typed answer, now you get 150 for both. Does it matter the way it is now? Not too much, I suppose, as it’s better than nothing.
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