Thanks Olaf, I’ll check that out
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 couple videos I’d recommend are these ones: https://youtu.be/saVJN5-_JDM
https://youtu.be/F1j1Zx0mXME
https://youtu.be/iCZzcSnAeH4
https://youtu.be/tG-WgW6U8ds
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.
Correct me if I am wrong but I don’t think I can (easily or automatically) download courses via a computer browser (ie it’s only possible in the app).
This is not a problem for courses I’ve created as I have the data in a spreadsheet - although it doesn’t reflect any slight improvements.
But it is a problem for all the abandoned courses I support, so I really hope Decks keeps going.
I want to have the answers either after choosing the wrong response or with a button when I want to after the timer is finished.
The last update made community courses possible.
Hi all, just wanted to say thanks a lot to everyone who came yesterday @scmelville @houssam.alissaed @Senior_Tradesmen57 @Julia_Halder36 @SilentShuffle @tommcb and who represented the views of others who couldn’t make it.
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.
Sounds hopeful. In my experience most companies give a damn on the community concerns and don’t listen. PLEASE surprise me Memrise! Please
@kevin5284, one of the things I hope for:
A completely separate discourse forum for Decks and a link to that forum prominently displayed on the Decks website.
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.
I hope you and @edcooke are assured now that Memrise users are not some killer maniacs with chainsaws.
Yep, I still have questions for you and Ed, but I need some time to think about them.
All we need is an app. Ideally, I feel like all the backlash would end is if they delay the launch of Decks until the app is ready and give users an option. Either use the site for free or pay to use the Decks Mobile app.
I’m sorry, but why are you so grateful now?
I had an impression that you are more than comfortable with the Decks website and do not care a bit about the apps. As far as I remember you did not say a word against this decision and I was even thinking that you are gloating over this mess with the apps (I could be wrong, of course).
Nice to meet you all @scmelville @houssam.alissaed @Senior_Tradesmen57 @Julia_Halder36 @SilentShuffle @tommcb
As Kevin mentioned, you represented the community very well; made points clearly, succinctly and represented the range of concerns I have seen voiced on the forums recently.
Mario and I were just saying it was a really nice way to spend the evening – and it wasn’t because there was free mexican food
I don’t need a timer to know that a word need more review.It’s better to find the word after long thinking than getting the response after 60 seconds based on my experience the more I take time remembering a word the more it’s easier to remember it again. That’s for simple vocabulary but if you have a grammar courses 60 seconds is really short for a lot of people.Anyway I’m which giving the user the choice.
As I’ve mentioned before, there is already an existing Decks mobile offline mode app. The existing Memrise app. Branch off the sources, rename it and point the courses to the Decks web site, do minimal maintenance – fix any breaks with mobile OS upgrade – and charge for the app.
This huge thread has been very educational and I have learnt a lot, namely that a lot of people use memrise as an offline app and that they download community courses to learn offline. I really was totally unaware of this. As I am a language teacher (mostly of English, but also German) and love to recommend memrise and have some new students that are Afghan refugees who only have smartphones, but no laptops or PCs, it became clear to me that it really would be a good idea if Decks was available as an app, also with the offline feature integrated, and not just as a web version. Their native language is Persian and there are only community courses for the language combination of Persian/German.
The fact that I personally have not really used or needed the offline feature, or don’t really like the app, is not relevant; I am grateful to @scmelville and the others mentioned above for representing the interests of the vast number of memrise users who do use these features and who would really like to have them in Decks, too.
I hope you can appreciate that there are people out there that can change their minds on the basis of new information: I am one of them. I now think the ideal solution would be to have Decks available as an app with an offline feature, as well as a web version.
Yup, you’re wrong
The person who has these thoughts only exists in your head, nowhere else, thank goodness! Because someone who “gloated” about this mess would be a pretty nasty and horrible person.
I do feel rather embarassed about my comment that I didn’t need an offline app because the trains round here have wifi, that was a bit smug and arrogant and I am a bit ashamed of having said it. BUT, on the other hand, because my comment was a bit outrageous, it actually provoked a lot of people into commenting and explaining exactly why - in their particularly country or for their particular needs - they needed the offline app. So my smug comment actually did some good in that it made people explain and made the need for an offline app even clearer.
I understand the rationale behind the split and am grateful that memrise have said that they will finance a free web version to host the community courses. That I “do not care a bit about the apps” is not correct; I just found the app version of memrise to be inferior in terms of learning and testing knowledge. But after learning what I have read here, I do care about the idea of Decks being available as an app with an offline feature integrated.
A friend of mine who is very social-media savvy said that she now tries to assume, in any online exchange, that the other person(s) in the conversation generally do not have any evil or malicious intent in their statements. I now try to assume the same and it has made using social media much more relaxing: if I find myself reading something negative into something someone has written, I try to remind myself that it is ME that is seeing negative things and that I have no way of knowing if the writer really intended anything negative. In the absence of proof, I try to assume that most people do not want other people to read malicious intentions into their words.
Please assume the same about me: I have never ever “gloated” about this latest decision by memrise.
Let’s hope that something good comes out of this discussion, even if it doesn’t materialise straight away!
All the best,
Amanda