To me (and maybe others) it would be a great improvement to add literal translations to the Memrise Mandarin courses.
In the Memrise Spanish course for example, a literal translation is given for any phrase or word. This is immensly helpful to get an understanding for how the language works, and how words are combined.
In the Memrise Mandarin course, this line in the layout seems to have been “repurposed” to show the characters for the Pinyin instead. While I wouldn’t want to miss those either, it would be awesome to have the literal translation in addition to that. Right now I’m just copy&pasting the characters one by one into Google translate to make sense of the meaning, but this also can be very off or unhelpful.
For example I know that “fàn” means meal. So why does “zuò-fàn” mean cooking then? I don’t no “zuò” yet. Ah, it means to prepare/make, that makes sense. (I hope you get what I mean).
Therefore I’d suggest to make literal translations available for Mandarin courses as well. This is probably also useful for other languages with other alphabets.