Thanks for the meeting report. I really appreciate the time you and other forum members took to attend this and voice the concerns we all have. I also give memrise significant credit for being open to a meeting of this type and for Ed, Kevin, and other memrise team members for devoting their time after working hours to go into what at the outset probably seemed like a hostile environment and have a substantive discussion.
Obviously I am still baffled and upset about their choices regarding their vibrant community course ecosystem. As someone else mentioned, other companies would kill to have this gem of a resource. @Senior_Tradesmen57 gives a great list of the couple points of most concern to me, and I am really hoping Memrise puts some effort into addressing these.
I’m furiously downloading current courses and possible ones I may want to do in the medium term future to Anki, but while Anki is powerful and configurable and not subject to corporate whims, I’d just really rather spend my time learning with the memrise app on courses I care about rather than getting up the steep learning curve on Anki. And while the points and gimmicks and modern interface on Memrise shouldn’t matter that much at a basic level, I am sort of used to them and like them. And my kids (also paying members) really like them, even when doing english vocab lists their mom coursified for them.
It was a great meeting, really good to be able to exchange ideas in an open and friendly context, so thank you to @edcooke and @kevin5284 and the other Memrise staff for hosting, and thanks for everyone who attended. Really felt welcomed and listened to.
This statement really does fascinate me as it should be clear that any average intelligent person would expect that the development and continuous support of a complex/comprehensive application simply costs money!
The reverse conclusion is quite simple: I want to use something that is being maintained, fixed, enhanced, you name it.
The logical consequence is equally simple: I’m more than willing to spend money on something alike.
Frankly spoken: spending money on an app or a service puts me - as a paying customer - in a situation where I can actually expect certain things to happen, or demand that problems are being fixed.
All this is pretty much out of the question for “free” apps (even if they refinance themselves by means of advertisements).
Consequently, users (me included) are afraid of a free service that would just sideline a product (Memrise “official”) and could well be reduced to a niche existence.
This is something I raised yesterday as well - I have tried to get to grips with Anki and failed - as a learner, the usability of Memrise (flaws and all) with community courses means you can just get on with the activity we’re interested in without wrestling with Anki (I know other people like it though).
I personally have found Quizlet very easy to use but would obviously prefer to keep the current Memrise ecosystem.
Same here! FWIW, I’ve searched high and low for an alternative. The only one I’ve found so far that …
allows/supports custom/community content
provides an app
provides offline capabilites
comes even close to Memrise’s abilites/functionalities
allows to import of Memrise courses (from what I’ve seen this currently means a detour via Ankhi, but it’s feasible and there might be an import facility for Memrise courses in the not so distant future)
… would be Memorion. Do a quick search for it, there’s a few video tutorials and informative content. It’s far from being the same as Memrise.
Also, Volker (who seems to be the author) has posted about it here.
Again, I’d definitely prefer to stick with Memrise - I love the community which is a part that is not to be underestimated either.
I honestly don’t know why people worry so much about the mechanics of Anki. They are not that hard to figure out, and you can always watch a short youtube video on what everything does. Case in point, I had too many decks so I looked for a way to tag everything in one deck (with its respective name), and then move them to a main deck. I don’t know any programming at all, and I honestly didn’t need to know anything else other than resizing the text because it’s too small and assigning which field goes in each card, which you can find tutorials on easily.
A tip I have for the actual learning is to mark words you’ve been learning for a while and can’t get them in your head so you can cram them the old-fashioned way until Anki asks you for those words. Once that happens, you’re on track and you won’t forget them.
I haven’t looked much into Quizlet, but I’ll also try that out to see if it’s a better alternative.
It was great to meet you in person and talk through all the points that have been covered here in the past weeks. I read everything here but personally found it very insightful to get more context on how you use and see Memrise (both the community courses and in-house ones), why the mobile app and offline means a lot to you, your willingness to pay for that, and some of your pain points like course discovery.
We’ll report back soon on when the Decks website is planned to go live, what the beta period will be, and whether there will be a Decks mobile app. Looking forward to your feedback on those.
Let me know if you have any questions in the meantime.
Cheers
ps I haven’t forgotten about improving the abandoned courses, just been a busy week so had to put that on the back burner! I’ll try to come back to it next week
As mentioned above, I would be extremely willing to pay a subscription for an app available offline for community courses, thank you for having the meeting and discussing this!
I was using official courses in the few first month after joining Memrise after that I never used them I used community courses instead.As for offline mode it was already said by a lot of people that we don’t have access to internet everywhere.I use the app 95% of the time offline so without it Memrise and the future Deck is completely useless to me.
You can use a browser extension to export an arbitrary course to Anki or use my little Windows application (linked to somewhere around post 100 in this thread) to get a CSV with your course data.
I agree with the previous poster: if you can’t find the word within a few seconds at the most, you don’t. know. the. word. Unless you know the answer instantly, you are just still in learning mode, not in “knowing mode”.
I do appreciate, however, that for languages with alphabets that are different to your own, that the timer may be unhelpful for beginners.
It would be nice to have the option to switch the timer off for those languages.
Thanks so much to you and the other memrise users who were with you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to raise the concerns voiced here by many memrise users.
It’s really really appreciated!
Even if changes are not made to memrise’s plans in the near future, perhaps they will implement them later. And, if they do, it will be partly thanks to you and the others who attended this meeting.
