I have silently used memrise in my own corner of the world while using physical flash cards, anki, etc on the side.
I have thoughts on memrise’s standard features and figured I’d just toss them out there and see if any changes result.
Some of them are probably covered in other topics since they are obvious:
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Mems:
Mems are nice things for personal enrichment. However, whenever making a mem for a user created course, as far as I can tell, that mem must be public.
This ruins the purpose of some of the most well-known speed learning techniques that are based on personal experiences, personally known locations, risque or highly graphic imagery/word play (likely to cause issues to my account’s standing or get taken down), interpersonal moments, personal knowledge of other languages & studies, incomplete information, and inside jokes.
These strong choices for associative memory are completely useless to the public, but they are significantly useful to a learner. As far as I’m able to tell, there’s no way to hide your mems from the public eye in these courses though. It would be very beneficial to be able to spare other users of personal mems. -
Mems (on the android app):
They are not invisible until requested like they are on the website. They’re translucent and covered by a bar until clicked.
This makes mems that are incorrect, confuse information, are based on misinterpretation due to a lack of experience with the language, or provide distracting & unrelated imagery unavoidable if the information extends beyond that bar. It would be better to never load other users’ mems until they are requested by the app user. Not automatically loading these mems might also save on data, who knows. And if they are normally downloaded with course data, not doing so might make large text-only courses easily downloadable. -
Memrise Pro features:
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Speed review:
Speed review is a neat idea for rapid testing of singular words and simply data, but it’s too quick for sentences & speeds up too much.
Whenever I do a speed review, I always expect 3 words/phrases out of every 20-30 to go straight into the “difficult words” section since I was unable to spend enough time to find the answer that I already know. It also seems to cut the time given to me in half very quickly and start the timer bar half-way up from there. I have no idea if that’s intended or not, but it really hurts if a course gives similar phrases/sentences in its answers. Others might find it too hard for anything.
Maybe it should allow the user to completely time out with no penalty & no reward?
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Speed review:
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Chat / Grammar Bots:
This is a good idea, but there is not anywhere near enough of these. I was very disappointed after paying for pro.
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Chat / Grammar Bots:
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Other Suggestions
Failing questions, but answering correctly :
Some words or phrases can have different interpretations & equally correct answers if the course is large enough.
If a question is failed, it’d be nice to provide a link to a good dictionary for that language (or a detailed explanation of the phrase if it is a memrise course) & allow the user to immediately prevent it from being put into the “difficult words” category if they understood it. There doesn’t even need to be a points benefit to this since some people take points very seriously. Sometimes, using alternative spellings for English words or spelling an English word incorrectly will fail a question as well.
One recent example I have gave me “to take (a picture)” as the English equivalent of a word.
By “picture” it means photo (a quick image search makes that obvious.)
In the area I live in, I’ve never heard someone say “take a picture” in English.
“to take a photo” is incorrect during the quiz.
“to take a picture” is correct.
I can not alter these results.
This is just frustrating to me since my only options are to force myself to adapt to English phrasing that I don’t use or click “ignore this word” and never study the word in that course on memrise.
Option to disable the letter/symbol boxes when a word is nearly mastered:
Process of elimination is not a great self-testing tool. It’s a great deduction tool.
To make things simple, say I’m doing a course and I get this question:
"Two + Two = "
Under the blank box that I can type into I get these in clickable boxes:
U - R - I - O - ) - F - ( - A - 1 - 4
I don’t need to know the answer at all. I just need to know some words that I can make with letters F - O - U - R - I - A . “Oh right, I learned “FOUR” at some point!”
Say I legitimately can’t remember the difference between “FOUR” and “FIVE” and should be forced to review them if chose incorrectly. Subconsciously or Consciously, I might choose “FOUR” only because I didn’t have the other letters available as an option. I might even choose to type FOUR as a reaction to seeing these letters (and later fail to recall the answer when using paper notecards.)
This crutch should not exist when a word is mastered or about to be mastered.
I am finding myself resorting to paper or anki notecards for everything I “mastered” in memrise to make sure that I actually know them by heart when I don’t have these clues.
Disabling “Tapping Tests” does not get rid of them on the website or in the app.
I’d like the option to have letter boxes disabled.
Memrise Dictionaries:
Right now, the closest thing memrise has to learning strong grammar skills or understanding a word outside of a 1 to 1 English equivalent is the chatbots…
Unless memrise wishes to greatly expand the amount of text and dialogue available to their chat bots in every language available, the best use memrise has is in drilling words and phrases to their English equivalents.
Therefore, I’d like to at least have a way for words to connect to a word dictionary for each language & for memrise to have a level-based grammar dictionary for their own courses within the app/website to help make sense of otherwise misleading information.
Maybe this list will help inspire some minor revisions. Thank you.