Important Update: Upcoming changes to Memrise community-created courses

Do you mean their latest update for Android? I have installed it. Nothing is broken (yet), but Chinese flashcards with symbols are not fixed (still). :slight_smile:

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No. I was talking about this post in particular. I stumbled upon it right when it hit, despite not being active on the forums much. Also, the app was and will always be broken/bugged. No amount of course purging is going to change that.

Theyā€™re saying that this separation will be beneficial for their official Memrise site and app, but even that is not guaranteed at all. With all their terrible decisions and stubborn refusals to fix the actual issues, itā€™s pretty clear that they will screw up, regardless if they split the courses or not. The only difference is that now, thereā€™s gonna be fewer people to call them out on it.

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I found my alternative once Decks is launching Iā€™m going to delete my account

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I think they want to implement new features, and they donā€™t want to worry about how they will work with community created courses. Many features (for me specifically: learn with locals, listening skills, and pronunciation) are simply not used with my community courses, so I just have a bunch of grayed out things. Or when they updated the app and took over half the screen to display audio. These werenā€™t really meant to affect the community courses. I think they will add even more complex things soon that could negatively affect community courses. That said, they better have some pretty impressive stuff coming ( and more courses too) in order to compete with the already highly saturated market.

Iā€™m mostly upset there is no app for decks. Itā€™s 2019. If you donā€™t have an app, youā€™re irrelevant. Which is what decks will be in about two months.

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Well, if they canā€™t scale an app to handle simple custom courses up to more complex material, I doubt they could pull off implementing more complex features.

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Giving it another thought, I can understand the objective need to split courses. Memrise may want to implement big new features and existing courses may need update. Thatā€™s not feasible for all the user courses.

Why not to fork not only the site, but the existing App as well? Very limited support for Decks App. New stuff for Memrise.

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Terrible, just TERRIBLE. I have been for years a Japanese learner on Memrise and a Pro subscriber.
I donā€™t particular like the Memrise courses. I have done Japanese 0, working currently on 1 and 2 and decided not to do any other Memrise Japanese courses. Grammar on Japanese 1 is not done and useless that way. On Japanese 2 itā€™s only half done. Yeah not much help. The sentence introductions coming way to fast. And do I really need to know to use Kabuki in 3 different sentences without first learning the word Kabuki? Same goes for other words, first the sentences are introduced then the world. Not much use coming after I learned it the hard way.
I still donā€™t know when to use ā€˜ć‚’ā€™ - wo, " ćÆ" - wa and other particles because you throw sentences out and no explanation.
I am better with community courses that just have words or simple sentences. And now you are going to dump them somewhere else, without offline support, (which is the reason I am paying) and fricken mobile website. Are you kidding me.
We canā€™t even learn the courses together on the app as it is now and have to go to 2 different sites just to do them?
Would it not have been easier to just split community courses and Memrise courses but leave them on the same platform. Or is the intent to use it as a garbage disguise and the community courses going to disappear slowly because of no maintenance of decks?

Memrise you can be sure that I will end my pro subscription the day you make this come true.

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That technically is illegal, if I remember correctly. Forget the fact that they donā€™t even seem to credit the community, like all those courses on science, geography, etcā€¦ that existed on the app were theirs. But those courses are long gone from the app so now they shouldnā€™t even talk about science and geography when all they have is language.

Then again, who looks at the About section?

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I am very upset about this. In my house we have not one but THREE pro memberships. Iā€™ve been using memrise for a few years and have spent large amounts of time on it learning. I just love using the app with community courses, and do so every morning while I drink my coffee.

The combination of app, community courses, and offline capability is great. The Decks model will break all this and make it pointless for me to pay for membership.

App
I use the app exclusively. It is fast, convenient, and great to use when I have a few minutes. My daughters prefer the web version, but the contexts I want to study in mean a computer is not going to work for me. I have yet to use a ā€œmobile friendlyā€ website that is actually as good as the app version when used on a phone.

Community Courses
When I first joined memrise about two years ago, I gave the official Korean course a try. It sucked horribly and was nearly useless. It had lots of inappropriate and inconsistent conjugations and plenty of outright errors. Maybe it is better now, I donā€™t know. But after discovering the world of community content, I never went back. Even if memrise had 10x the budget to develop courses, it is impossible to match the spectrum and depth of what is supplied by an enourmous army of community developers working for free.

Iā€™ve worked through a few korean courses, but now am about 30% of the way through TalkToMeInKorean levels 1-10, with native audio (>5000 words). I love TTMIK podcasts, and this deck is the perfect companion for it.

Even if memrise courses were good, they wonā€™t help me now for korean now that I am beyond basic level. Ditto for mandarin, where Iā€™m working an HSK levels 1-5 course (>6000 words).

Iā€™m living in Malaysia for 6 months with my family, and working a community course for Malay language. Memrise has no official course for this language.

We also create our own courses for our kids as part of homeschooling. My wife makes vocab lists for them to do on their own via memrise to accompany the curriculums they are using for English. This is so much better than paper cards, since the SRS is great in itself for learning and review, they can do it on their own efficiently, and we donā€™t have to make paper cards. Difficult words is an important feature for us.

Offline
This has been great for long airplane trips, and for everyday commutes when internet drops out during part of my bus ride. Also in Malaysia where Iā€™m living now, LTE coverage is not that good and often unavailable.

Summary
What Iā€™ve been paying happily for (remember THREE memberships) is the memrise platform loaded with community content. Iā€™ve evangelized a lot for memrise for years to fellow language learners. I hate the fact that this will all be going away. I just canā€™t fathom why this company would destroy this awesome product that I am so glad to pay for. Wouldnā€™t be the first time a company kills a great product with misguided decisions I guess. I wish I could keep paying for the product I like, but if it is not available anymore I suppose Iā€™ll have to cancel.

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Not to say the app is perfect. For instance, when I hit the Help button, it shows a screen that says I am ā€œout of internet fuelā€? WTF? Iā€™m a pro member!

But despite the bugs and frustrations and Memrise Corp. actively trying to make the app worse, it has been a wonderful resource for learning.

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Memrise on Steroids announcement :frowning:

Totally agree with you about the too rapid introduction of sentences in the official courses - I spent last year working through the German ones and simultaneously using a community one of 2000 frequent words and the Memrise experience just works better for simple vocab lists.

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I would pay the current cost of pro, and I would even say a bit more to be able to keep using the current mobile experience with community courses

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My students (vocational school, learning medical subjects with my courses) definitely love the App and often recommend it to friends and family. I doubt they would use the website, because they often learn when commuting and, sad but true, in our ā€œhigh-tech-Germanyā€ mobile net coverage is often poor/ not existing. Some of of my students owe their passing of the exams to your App (thatĀ“s what they tell me :slight_smile:
So please develop an App for Decks with offline mode!
And thank you for years of fun with teaching with the help of memrise!

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That would be for the best; they should just leave Memrise the way it is now!
No further ā€œupdatesā€ and no changes are necessary (if thatā€™s what makes them believe they need to get rid of their users content because thatā€™s exactly what it seems like to me).
I highly doubt Iā€™ll ever like Decksā€¦
If they want a more organized list of courses, why not split the ā€˜coursesā€™ page into official and user created courses? This concept works perfectly fine on iknow.jp.

If theyā€™re really going to make such a big change they could at least provide us with several backup plans.
They could give us the possibility to download whole courses (including media files and everything else) before itā€™s too late.
Instead of making this dreading ā€œupdateā€ reality they could just leave everything the way it is now and shift their focus on creating a downloadable software of Memrise (like Anki).

I hope someone with influence of the Memrise team reads this as well as many other comments. Donā€™t make this update happen.

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Yes, you can export your courses (along with your progress) to Anki by using this add-on: https://github.com/wilddom/memrise2anki-extension

First install Anki and afer that install the add-on. The add-on will add an option ā€œImport from Memriseā€ under the Toola menu. By providing the url of a particular course in Memrise, you can download it into Anki.

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I just canā€™t get my head around around this decision. None of my courses are Official because they donā€™t cover what I need to learn. I learn Japanese and the JLPT Courses are perfect, they cover the grammar, vocab and readings tailored to the specific level. I also use the Genki and Guide to Japanese courses, because they are linked to the book and extremely useful. I donā€™t have a laptop at home so my main form of learning is using an app, take that away and I wonā€™t be able to learn Japanese using your website. Iā€™ve been a member for at least 7 years and have loved every aspect. Only just got back into it after a break, now youā€™re going to take this away. There doesnā€™t seem to be a logical reason behind this and I wish this wouldnā€™t happen. There is no support for this new Decks and you can reverse the decision easily. There are other ways to promote your Official courses.

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@kevin5284

What will happen to these forums after the community-made courses are split off? All the community related stuff will then be potentially redundant and not in keeping with the future development or image of the Memrise brand.

Also, after the split, will it become two separate memberships for Memrise and Decks?

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Iā€™m intrigued by this announcement. What chance were users given to input to this decision?

I can tell you why. This is a management issue and the management of this company is arrogant and not customer focused. I loved your note. It mirrors much of what Iā€™ve been doing myself. But, alas, donā€™t expect any change.

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