I think the app should encourage you to create memes if you aren’t or even force you to create if you want to keep learning (not aggressively, just every once in a while, it would make the courses much richer - today a lot of the courses don’t have so many memes)
It already encourages users to create mems. I don’t see any value in forcing it on users who are not helped by this feature.
2 Likes
There should be a way to import existing mem’s to a course. There are a lot of good mem’s out there, but as new courses are created there’s little way to reuse them.
‘‘Forcing’’ creation = encourages the quitters to quit, encourages the rebels to create crap, annoys everyone else 
Quality over quantity!
4 Likes
Yes, this is so true! I sent this to Memrise a week ago but no response yet:
"Currently, as someone else mentioned elsewhere on the forum, we are limited to a choice of up to seven mems (of varying quality) that have been created by users of the particular course we are viewing, or to make one ourselves (which we may already have done in another course but may not have a way of reproducing) or to opt to go without. What this can mean is that, we miss out on being able to see and choose a better mem that already exists in another course.
"For example, I recently started the new “Spanish 1” and “Spanish 2” courses to see how they compared with the former “A1 Spanish” and other courses I had already completed. For many of the words I was being shown, I knew from doing those earlier courses that some excellent mems had been created but which were not available to choose – presumably because they are linked to a different database. The majority of mems currently showing in Spanish 1 and 2 are no help at all!
"I believe the course quality and the learning experience would be improved if a way could be found to link mems to all instances of the word or phrase they relate to, regardless of the course or database they are in."
3 Likes
in my new private courses for Chinese I do see mems… So I think the team made some changes in the way mems are displayed, mems are being imported.
1 Like
Hmm, that’s interesting. I haven’t noticed any changes in the public courses in recent days. I’ll keep checking. 
PS: …or, when making your new courses, are you drawing from an existing database or creating a new one? I think that makes a difference.
well, I am adding items by hand, one by one. And: a- I am checking every entry in 2,3 dictionaries - therefore I modify potential existing entries; b- also I am writing the pinyin with accents, not numbers (the majority of mandarin courses prefer numbers ) Despite these differences, I have noticed 2 days ago I “have” mems !!! surprise, surprise.
Note: Well, as I don’t believe in mems for Chinese above the beginner level, I did not really check every item my learning page is set on “do not display mems”, or how is that option called.
For all the years I’ve been using memrise, there has always been some automatic process that picks up mems and connects them to other courses. It’s often quite bad, and picks up mems that aren’t appropriate for the item or even actively misleading, and memrise never answered my questions about how the system works, but it’s always been there. If you create a course in a language that there are already many mems for, some of those will start appearing in your course within a week or two.
1 Like
That used to be case, generally, but it´s not my experience of what is happening with the new language courses created by Memrise. As I said, I think it’s something to do with which database the course draws on.
Oh, that’s pretty bad. It might explain why I came across a mem the other day that ties the word to the false friend instead of the actual meaning. Terrible.
I don’t generally find the use of mems that helpful in the courses, and the quality results vary a lot with some wildly inaccurate ones trying to teach you the wrong thing.
1 Like
Please don’t force the making of mems. We would get tons of empty cards, or exclamation marks, ellipses and quite probably rude remarks, which would be funny in a way, I guess, but still.
Also, I found mems useful when beginning to learn a language, but not anymore, I don’t even care that much about them, so personally I don’t see any appeal in it. And even when I did, I preferred the ones I came up with to those created by others – those reflected their way of thinking and were therefore not so comfortable as my own ones.
However on a related note this brings up a question: is there even a way to search among mems? Or to list out the mems for a given course or even better, for a given language or language pairing? That would be a useful feature, and also something for course creators who have way too much time on their hands to pick “outside” mems they want to appear on their course as well.
2 Likes