I have two friends that created a few courses in the Pular language, and translated one huge course from English to French.
These courses are being used by users that live in Africa, where internet connection is very bad. At the moment I’m also living in an African country and using memrise to learn this language, having a Pro account for two years already.
What should I do now? What should all these users do? What should do these friends that are having all this work?
Don’t forget that you won the Google Play app award of 2017, in part due to all the community courses…
Waiting for your advice.
Suggestion: Make the memrise app open source, name it something else, and leave it as it is, working with the community courses that will be available in Decks.
I’ve had a pro subscription for several years now, solely for the offline mode. I only use the community courses on my phone. Tried the official courses once, didn’t like them, and did not want to start learning the basics from scratch again when I’m about intermediate by now.
And now you are removing every feature I pay for. I hope you realise that means I - and a lot of others with me seeing the comments - will be removing our subscription. It appears I have until March to find an alternative.
Previously i used Anki and it was great with lots of user created decks and offering huge flexibility to change the courses and coding them in any way to make them conform exactly with your needs, the only thing that Anki missed is contact between users and points and leaderbords which is just a fun aspect of Memrise, for serious learners and pro users that spent time to learn a language with special courses which are mostly made by users it’s gonna be the end of Memrise. I used the app to learn and review GRE, IELTS etc words which were created by users from special sources and i didn’t found anything in Memrise created courses to be the same, and keep it in mind that like other users here mentioned taking the App and Offline-mode away will affect many users living in areas with poor internet services, all in all i think that this change will be mostly like an inadvertent SUICIDE for Memrise and apparently YOU’R GONNA PUT THE LAST NAIL IN MEMRISE’S COFFIN IN MID-MARCH. Good for You, I hope you respect the spate of resentments and change your mind and don’t witness huge numbers of users posting “Goodbye Memrise, Hello …” in mid-march or later
Without knowing the reasons for this, quite a bad move for me and it will cause me to cancel my paid subscription. I was only using the paid subscription to use Memrise offline…
It might be cool if you learn one of the main big languages, but in my case, I’m learning Lithuanian, there is no great big official Memrise course for it. All useful content for Lithuanian is community based…
…so in my case, it is a very bad shift…sad…
An app without community-created courses is quite useless (at least for me). If your resources are enough for maintaining a single app, would you mind maintaining a Decks app instead of a Memrise app? I can’t have offline sessions on a webpage and I don’t really use Memrise’s (mostly low level) own courses. Apart from my own word lists I mostly use other people’s word lists.
Putting two contradicting ideas in bold (In mid-March, all community-created courses will move to Decks. and everything will work almost exactly the same.) is annoying and not being thoughtful at all, to be honest. Not having community-created courses available offline in the app is a HUGE shift for my purposes, it basically means that nothing will be the same.
I’m not sure if this has been asked already and I’m probably being a bit stupid but how do we know what courses are community made courses. Will we be notified by memrise as to which courses are changing?
I’m a bit concerned about a statement re. the app being ‘mobile friendly’. In one place it is stated as being available ONLY as a mobile-friendly version and somewhere else the ‘only’ is omitted. I primarily use Memrise (community courses) on a laptop and wouldn’t want the laptop version of Decks to become anything like the mobile version of Memrise. Can you clarify please?
I paid for a one year subscription which is now useless, fortunately I’m still within the 30 money back period so I’ll be cancelling and requesting a refund
How incapable you are. It is not a hard work, if you have any problem with community created courseses, it could have been managed by changing privacy policy. Instead, some of the genius in your team found that lovely idea. Very-well, it is not too hard to create a mobile app like memrise. At least, the content of courses could be sent to their owners proparly as a .xml, .excel etc. including added sound files. How can you be so sure, what if we don’t want to move our contents into a free platform?
Just cancelled my subscription - the vast majority of my time on Memrise is on the tube, where I need offline access to my custom-made courses. I’m learning French and the Memrise-made courses have nothing to offer at an intermediate/advanced level. So without offline mode for community courses, Memrise is no use to me. Very sad.
(I also see that in any case the subscription price is about to be raised by almost 50 percent, according to Google Play. Unclear why I’d pay more for less functionality.)
I can only echo what everyone else is saying. Please re-think what you’re doing here - you will lose subscriptions of long-standing members of the community.
I have been using Memrise for years - and now mostly use the app for studying community-created courses - making these changes will mean that I will no longer be able to do this and so will no longer use Memrise. I have been looking at Anki for a while - but it just doesn’t do what Memrise currently does. However with these changes it will, for me, become a vastly better option.
Cheaper hosting, slower bandwidth, lower fault-tolerance. Freezing the platform and not spending time on fixing bugs and supporting it. Change the main subscription model to increase profit
It technically is, but in Anki’s case you answer the card and then you pick yourself what time interval it waits before prompting you to review it, whereas Memrise does that automatically based on how well you’ve answered it over time.
I paid life-time subscribe for community-created courses to learn Japanese off-line, and now I must admit that the choice you made is truly heart-breaking.
I love your brand memrise, I wish you don’t let us down.
I don’t want a “mobile website”. I do 90% of my Memrise studying on a desktop PC.
I prefer a legit app for for when I do actually study on my phone.
Even though I almost exclusively use community-created courses, I pay for Memrise (two subscriptions even!) so I can use these features (the non-mobile site, the app, learning stats, offline mode).
Why not ask the community and gauge their opinions before making such a drastic change?
This sounds terrible. At best you are annoying users by removing features and driving many of them away. At worst (and I believe much more likely so), you are killing the likelihood of future community-driven courses.
Don’t do this. I’m sorry for being pessimistic, but very rarely do I see these sort of changes actually work out as intended.
What is the URL for the new terrible site? I need to at least make sure it is whitelisted.
As many of you are doing right now, I’ll be transferring all my courses to Anki, which I advise everyone who is unhappy with the current state of Memrise to be doing. You can find an import add-on here https://github.com/wilddom/memrise2anki-extension . Just add it to the Anki folder and you’re good to go. I sadly couldn’t find a way to add the audio to those courses, so thanks to Memrise’s marvelous idea, I’ll have to download the audio of over 10k words one by one again. If you decide to use the import, please note that you need version 2.0 of Anki, not the latest one. Reason being that the add-on is not updated.
I’ll be also canceling my subscription and possibly deleting my courses when I’m completely finished with the transition. Decks or not, you lost a subscriber and an active member of your site.
Also, many pointed this out, but Memrise is not Duolingo/Rosetta stone, nor is it Anki. You are desperately trying to have the cake and eat it too. While Duolingo does a better job at being Duolingo and Anki at being Anki.