I’ve always assumed there is no Maximum Watering period cap, Today I knew about the 180 Days Maximum and it came a bit of shock, Let’s see why I was shocked in numbers:
Anyone who’s spent sometime in Memrise and have more than 8M+ points should have at least 7000 words learned, now assuming he has learned all of them by heart, he will need to review about 40 words every day just to keep up with the number of words he has, if he misses a day, he’ll have to review 80 words the next day, so on and so forth, I can’t imagine how someone with 10,000+ words could learn any new words, because everyday he’ll have at least 60 words to review + the new words, miss 2 days and it’s 120+ words, and this will keep getting worse and worse the more you learn, No one will ever be able to keep up and eventually will be overwhelmed by the number of words !!
I have no idea what Memrise were thinking while implementing this feature, even if it’s a scientific thing, It will render Memrise useless after some time and veterans will have to start quitting courses which defeats the whole purpose of using Memrise because once you forget a course, it will be as if you haven’t ‘Memrised’ it the first place.
This is not a problem for anybody with less than 4000 words, that’s why not many people are complaining (or because they don’t know about the 180 Days cap), but if you’re planning to stay for a long time and expand your words base, You will eventually care, and that’s why it should be now!
We need to change this now, At least make it an optional un-checked by default option in the settings.
I see what you’re saying. I easily review 500 words a day, so adding new words has become difficult. But, something which needs to be considered is that your time to recall the information goes down as well. So, most of my courses which I “learned” months ago, I can review 100 words in about 5 minutes, because I get maybe 5 wrong, and the rest I recall instantly. Whereas, when I initially learned these words I would think for 5 or so seconds per flashcard to recall what the meaning was…
So, while the number of flashcards has gone up, I am quicker as well. As for quitting courses, I do do that from time to time. But, only when I am confident the material is foundational. If the words are within the 1,000 most common words in a target language you are learning, if you do any reading outside of memrise, there is no way you could possibly forget those words, or if you do. You will get enough exposure that they will become automatic eventually.
We had a very long discussion about this issue on the old memrise forum, and I recall that many people liked my idea.
I also posted it on the old uservoice suggestion forum, where it got a lot of votes and was repeatedly on the front page of the most-voted suggestions.
Memrise never ever addressed my suggestion. Not even to comment to say they wouldn’t do it. They just never commented on it, either on uservoice or on the discussion forum post that was active for a long long time.
Then they shut down the discussion forum and the uservoice suggestion forum, and opened this community site, where they explicitly told us, very directly, that they do not want people to post feature suggestions and they will not read them if we do.
For historical value, here is the feature I proposed, and still thing would fix one of memrise’s biggest problems…
Words you learn go into the review pool as normal, where they get scheduled for review on an increasing schedule in intervals up to 180 days.
When you get the same word correct twice in a row at 180 day intervals, that word gets moved out of the regular review pool into a new separate pool called “fully learned”. Words in “fully learned” do not get scheduled for review on a regular schedule, they just sit there.
However, you can see how many words are in your fully learned pool. Separately, you can see how many words have been sitting in your fully learned pool for 90 days or longer. And whenever there are any words in your fully learned pool that have been there for 90 days or longer, you can choose to do a review of fully learned words. You will get a random selection of words that have been fully learned for 90 or more days.
If you do a fully learned review, any word you get correct just goes back into the fully learned pool as if it was newly placed there (so it won’t come up in your next fully learned review until 90 days later). However, any word you get wrong goes back into the normal review pool, and starts getting scheduled on the usual memrise schedule. Of course you can eventually get that word back into fully learned once you get it correct often enough.
(One minor clarification: At the time I originally suggested this, memrise didn’t have a concept of red wrong vs. yellow almost-right. I think in this case if you get yellow on fully learned word, then if you get it right on its next review it can go right back into fully learned without going through the normal schedule).
I like this because it solves the problem of building up an ever increasing endless list of words to review, but on the other hand it doesn’t take any words completely out so you’ll never see them again (or schedules them for years into the future, which amounts to the same thing). When you finish all your normal review and have more time, you can choose to review the ones you’ve fully learned, but they never get in the way of your normal review or obscure how many words you need to review to keep up with your learning.
That is a very good idea, very well thought out! It does seem that Memrise is more focused on those 5 minute a day app users who will never accumulate enough words to ever need a feature like this ,though. I have often wished something like this existed… so that way I can confidently say roughly what proportion of the course I know so I can better measure my own progress.
Yes, I forgot to add that one of the reasons I would like this feature is the sense of satisfaction when words go into “fully learned”, and the ability to see the growing count of “fully learned” for each course as a way to measure how well I know the material.
You’re exactly right @BaSsGaz. I have over 16,000 words learned so am spending hours every day watering because I have a fixation about watering. This means time spent on new words is limited and why I’m taking forever to get to the next level. I’ve even been debating about NOT finishing watering each day and instead spending more time on learning new words - but would this mean I would in fact be ‘learning’ more words or just expanding my watering list? Still debating.
@Maxine_Downunder: just my two cents… after prolonged and intensive years of love-hate with memrise. Don’t allow Memrise to take the overhand over your learning. It is your time, nobody gives it back to you. I had that watering fixation when trying very hard, too hard, to learn some bits of decent Mandarin: it took me one year and a half (one year and a half!!!) of my life to realise that learning if tong2 or tong4 by heart does not bring me one millimeter closer to understanding the most moronic text. (Geschweige… let alone speaking a bit)
if you finished some courses, save their links in a separate folder in your browser - and then quit those courses. Go back to water them when you deem appropriate. Not when the memrise algorithm tells you so.
Thank you @Hydroptere, I really appreciate your “two cents”. I think I’ll take up your advice. I was actually getting dangerously close to quitting altogether and I really don’t want to do that! Onward and upward!
Last year, I worked very hard from January to mid July. Then I got busy, I took it easy for a couple months, and the words needing review stacked up. In September, I did the Memathon (meaning: I planted A LOT and only watered newly planted words), but was busy in October. By November 1st, I had 17,000 words due for watering.
So what did I do in November?
I went back to planting, reviewed recently learned items, and worked on the watering backlog as I felt like it. I didn’t want to let reviewing Spanish get in the way of learning German and Turkish.
Yeah. Exactly.
One of the things you can do is water by course. Keep up with the watering in courses where you’re actively planting; let the watering go in courses you finished at least two months ago. This is similar to what @Hydroptere suggested, but without quitting the completed courses.
Another option is to water by level. (That’s what I prefer…) Watering by level allows me to focus on the items that I’ve planted recently. As for the items that aren’t getting watered promptly—I’m not going to forget something I planted two months ago simply because I water it after 56 days instead of 48 days. And I’m certainly not going to forget something because I reviewed it after 200 or 250 days instead of only 180.
I don’t mind that Memrise caps the watering period at 180 days. By the time you’ve learned enough words that it’s hard to keep up with the reviews, plenty of the words you’ve learned are not used in everyday conversation. I’m glad that Memrise exposes me to them from time to time. And those that I know really, really well? They’re good when I feel like earning easy points.
Either you try to keep up with your regular watering, but end up late on newly learned stuff so you take 2 days to get to something you should’ve reviewed in 4 hours, and you forget it by the time you review it… or you skip a lot of your regular watering and end up missing schedule on some stuff you learned a long time ago but got wrong recently, and again you forget it before you get to reviewing it and don’t get it reinforced in your memory efficiently.
Wow @Kaspian … 17,000 words to water - that would almost send me over the edge!!! It sounds like you came up with a workable solution for you. Thanks for your input, I really appreciate it.
I am one of the users that does 5 minutes a course but I am doing 13 courses at the same time per day without breaking my daily streak on every course. I have close to 8M points and about 3500 words learned but was recently wondering why I can not learn any new words because most of my courses collect between 30 and 47 words each to water. Now I know the reason why the words are going so high and also would like Memrise to consider to look into changing how the words we know reappear.
Recently learned words I review classically, the old ones fast!
I am not yet that into the matter, I make more mistakes, so even after a 12 hour working shift, I can review hundreds of words.
You can ignore words if you are confident, right?
Ignoring words is one workaround that some people use, but it means you’ll never get that word again. You might forget it and never realize you’ve forgotten a word from the course. It would be valuable to have a way to let you sometimes review those words you were confident about - but only when you choose to, when you have time for it, and not interfering with review of words you haven’t learned as well or as long ago.
Would it be possible for Memrise to tweek the program so that if you get the review correct at 180 days the next review is at 180 days + 20% and then the following review is 216 days + 20 % and so on?
The reviewing intervals are now almost completely arbitrary (they are at best based on an average, and averages are completely useless for individual situations). We need to have sliders for every reviewing interval according to our own preferences, or better, learning history, (up to a maximum, and different for multiple choice and typing courses) and according to the language we are studying (short for Chinese, long for Spanish), and perhaps even for the particular course we are studying.
I’m ambivalent about the 180 days cap. Having it increase 10 or 20 percent every cycle sounds good. And also, the old idea of introducing some jitter into it so you won’t get presented with a mountain to review 180 days after you decided to clear the backlog sounds good.
Well, Memrise never responded to my jitter suggestion either
I originally suggested it at the same time as I suggested the “fully learned” feature.
Having the interval go up by 20% each time after 180 would be better than the status quo, I suppose, though I doubt memrise will pay more attention to that than they have to any other suggestions.
Another solution to huge backlogs would be ordering the words for review by the length of their watering period: the shortest ones first, so that they don’t get pushed back. And those “fully learned” words would sit there until you have processed the rest and have time for them.
