I would not mind the hard decision to divert the courses on separate track. But the lack of app is really disastrous.
It had never ever worked well on mobile website… I didn’t even bothered reporting it (as long, as it didn’t obstruct it completely )
Use some old version of Memrise App for it instead! They were awesome and You don’t need to develop them.
However without app am leaving (except the extremely unprobable edge case, where You manage it to be in mobile website having really comparable user experience to the App - ideally even back with MEMS!!)
I dunno. I originally found the organic grammar acquisition okay… but my mind mostly works that way – puzzling things together. The newer courses, however, are very touristy and too rote for this. If I wanted to know how to ask if my hotel room had a balcony, I could’ve put it together myself thanks, if they’d just given me the components of the sentences like in older courses.
I used to think of it as: here’s a group of verbs, this is how they decline; here’s some nice nouns you might need at some point… and now here’s an example of how you could put those words together – go make some sentences of your own based on this model.
The less flexible way they’ve changed to was disheartening when it showed up with the newer official courses (see my semi-rant on French for details, lol). I won’t be leaving the platform just the now because for the next month at least it serves my purposes (I never did fork out for pro, so this all hits me less (though that hardly stops me from seeing what a bad move it is)) for vocab acquisition but… I don’t know. Too tired now to even think right and I haven’t done my dailies on here, busy thinking about how the Memrise brass are a bunch of dipsh*ts, lol.
I think my point was that I have learned a lot of grammar off Memrise just through context, but that it was with the older official courses.
I just bought Memrise premium for the first time this December.
Deeply regretting this decision now. I wasted my money for nearly 10 months now on a service that they are literally not going to provide me.
If they don’t reverse the decision, or provde pro-rata refunds, I might just stop using the app altogether. Pretty unacceptable how they are treating paying customers.
What is the point of this? Is this a failed project? Were you trying to create a second app but couldn’t get it done on budget?
I only see community created content being hobbled – no improvements.
50% of my language learning is through high quality community-created decks right now. It’ll be 100% in a month or two after I finish the limited Memrise-created content for my language. I study primarily on the subway and in other areas with poor internet connection. Hobbling that content so that it can only be reached through the web - and so that its features will be extremely limited - will make your product extremely inconvenient for myself and many other users.
Do you have a plan to improve Decks so it will actually be usable, or should we just save time and switch over to other systems?
I have already suggested a feature like this to Merise directly and although it might seem very unpopular I still want to put some faith and trust into those people. I’m pretty sure, that I have been around here much longer than most of the other users (I started way back in beta-times), so I have seen a lot of ups and downs, but I still think it is worth trying.
Nevertheless I would also very much appreciate such a feature.
In the meantime I would like to advise you (and others in need of such a tool) to look around the forum, because there was one user, who created a tool, which allowed you to download your course data - at least some of it - into some basic file.
There will be lots of things you can get involved in doing, should you so wish, without needing to be an expert at anything - speaking from personal experience
I’ve been announcing this earlier than intended here on account of it seems like a great thread to be talking about it. For example, recording audio in your native language (or one that you speak at that level). Our hope is that getting people on board for this will avoid my pet hate which is listening to synthesised voices. Can’t stand them!
So, for example, I’ve done the audio for a tiny sample, one of the Peter Rabbit stories. I’m no expert and I just have ordinary equipment, but it’s turned out okay. Similarly we have samples of Icelandic and Farsi. I’m about to get started on Alice in Wonderland so that we have a larger scale example. As you are reading you’ll be able to mouse over for the audio when you want, as well as having translation available and all sorts of personalised goodies, your own concordance of every word you’ve read, things like that.
At at teacher level, there will be various ways for the text to be marked up according to the requirements of the teacher. Of course, you may be self-taught and want to do this for yourself. Material may be kept private or public - we are hoping that people will want to make material they’ve created public, but this is according to the creator’s choice. We are hoping that teachers will connect on the site and be able to exchange some skills - eg creating native audio in return for translations, that kind of thing.
Because of a comment about not being expert at anything, in terms of the CALL community we are building right now, could I say:
There will be lots of things you can get involved in doing, should you so wish, without needing to be an expert.
I’ve been announcing this earlier than intended here on account of it seems like a great thread to be talking about it. For example, recording audio in your native language (or one that you speak at that level). Our hope is that getting people on board for this will avoid my pet hate which is listening to synthesised voices.
So, for example, I’ve done the audio for a tiny sample, one of the Peter Rabbit stories. I’m no expert and I just have ordinary equipment, but it’s turned out okay. Similarly we have samples of Icelandic and Farsi. I’m about to get started on Alice in Wonderland so that we have a larger scale example. As you are reading you’ll be able to mouse over for the audio when you want, as well as having translation available and all sorts of personalised goodies, your own concordance of every word you’ve read, things like that.
At at teacher level, there will be various ways for the text to be marked up according to the requirements of the teacher. Of course, you may be self-taught and want to do this for yourself. Material may be kept private or public - we are hoping that people will want to make material they’ve created public, but this is according to the creator’s choice. We are hoping that teachers will connect on the site and be able to exchange some skills - eg creating native audio in return for translations, that kind of thing.
Thanks for all the responses to our posting this, anybody who is interested, please email and we will put you on our list to keep updated! [email protected]
I could record audio… I have an unusual natural accent but can do a good general British, too, if that’s what’s needed. Will definitely be contacting in morning for more info on project, as sounds promising. Especially with Memrise seemingly going down the drain the now.
I’ll cancel my subscription as well. 1. More advanced courses won’t be available on non-mobile devices. I almost always use Memrise with my laptop, because it’s HUGE difference between learning with app and lap. I hate to use phone. The level of official Memrise courses is too low to learn them with a computer. I liked Memrise because, in general (with member-courses), had higher level than for example Duolingo (for me it’s pretty sh…ty) 2. When I used smartphone for learning: I payed ONLY because I could revise and learn offline- at the bus, train etc. ONLY. No application and offline learning- no payed subscription (and probably I won’t learn with memrise anymore. And I’m not the only one…). It’s obvious. As someone else said - If you make this change, you will lose all of your Premium members. 3. What will you do with MEMS? are also different on website and app.
I got my annual subscription because I wanted offline mode for my train journey. How should I go about claiming a refund for the unused part (I think it will be 9m).
I’ve been a user of Memrise for 6 years now, subscribed for 1.5 years, and am using my own courses 100% of the time now. If all functions of Decks are supposedly free and there isn’t even a mobile app anymore, there will be no reason for me to keep paying for Memrise, since it will be a service I do not use.
As other people have mentioned, there is reasonable fear that you will just close down Decks again after a while to leave people no other choice but to use Memrise, but… since it will be no longer a service I need, I will just move to another service instead where I can build my own vocab database.
Lol. I’ve never been a fan of Apple, but like the idea of hundreds of refund requests going through them and them just shaking their heads, looking at Memrise and saying “What a bunch of f*cking idiots”.
edit: About Memrise, not the users – you know, just to clarify.
Why are you saying you are committing to supporting community created courses forever with Decks for free, as if that wasn’t a base expectation of Memrise?
Before this announcement, Memrise has shifted development away from improving community created courses to their own in-house courses. Continuing to host the courses with the app and everything else was simply the most base expectation.
Those courses were already free minus some optional pro features. Decks is giving some of those features for free but removing much more in exchange (namely App support and offline mode).
Also, even just from a business standpoint there should be news about revamping the course creator with more features and quality of life changes. No, there is no news any real commitment to support the community courses more than you have been before, instead we are getting less support.
When you say you are committing to support it forever, it sounds like the alternative was that you would discard the community courses. You think we should be grateful that you value them just enough to push them to the side and keep them alive but without any app support and no features we didn’t have before?
Memrise grew because of this community. Committing to supporting the community courses forever was always the base expectation, so this statement is meaningless. Memrise has stuck to that bare minimum for a while, but this is reduction of your previous commitment.
Our courses are apparently not worth the development time and money it takes to support an app. Even though you already have them working in an app right now, so it’s not like you have to develop a new one from the ground up.
We’re going to have to wait until we hear more from Kevin and co. as the rationale for doing this is far from obvious. The lack of an app and offline is not just a backwards step for Memrise but also out of step with the competition. If these features were exclusive to Memrise and obviously expensive to maintain then it would make sense. But they aren’t, so it doesn’t.
You would think this model of community content provided for free and with a proven customer base paying real money would at least wash its face.
My fear is that it actually does but it isn’t providing the sort of return that pays back previous funding rounds so they are going for broke with grandiloquent claims of new paradigms of online learning, while the existing model is sacrificed so all resources can be focused on the brave new world.
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