(Please if you agree or disagree, do voice your opinion below)
Hi there!
I had been somewhat idle with my official courses for about a month while traveling in Japan and focusing on some of the Decks kanji courses. Upon my return, however, I was very pleasantly surprised to find all of the Japanese courses from 1 and onwards (British versions) renewed and using mostly kanji. I think this is an excellent change, in part because it makes Speed Review much more efficient as I can read the sentences much quicker in kanji than in hiragana AND it improves my reading skills and retention tremendously because all words now have several meanings inside them.
Major kudos to you guys!
Now that this other issue has been sorted out, however, two others have surfaced, regarding Speed Review, which I hope you are able to look into.
I should mention that I mostly use Speed Review on my Android phone.
In Speed Review when you answer correctly, the speaker starts reciting the answer while the next question appears and keeps reading aloud while the time is ticking on the next question. This is bad for two reasons:
- It’s very difficult to concentrate on the next question while the last question is being read aloud leading to wrong answers and unnecessary difficult words.
- You don’t get the benefit of hearing the kanji read aloud while you have them in front of you, which means a lot of wasted learning potential.
Something else which also bothers me is how when you get a question wrong, it doesn’t read the right answer aloud, which I think would be very helpful. Now, I understand that you might worry about people being confused as to which answer is being read aloud (The wrong one that you picked or the right one), but I think this worry is unwarranted. These are all words or phrases that the learner has seen before and should therefore be able to recognise. Even if he doesn’t it does not take many wrong answers to deduce that it is the right answer that is being read aloud (and it should always be the right answer).
I really enjoy Speed Review as it is somewhat similar two an actual conversation, but I am confident that these two changes would improve my user experience and learning by a whole lot!
I hope this request is considered and I trust it will be as the Memrise team has so far been impressingly responsive to other topics I have taken part in discussing on this forum.
Thank you, once again!