Very sad decision. I’ve been a pro member for several years by now. The reason for me to get the pro version was, that I could learn my class vocabulary with community created curses independent from internet connections e. g. on airplains, subways, on trains, in countries like Cuba with no or really expensive internet service.
Actually this was was your USP compared to other language learning apps.
I hope many people will follow my example and will cancel their subscriptions immediately.
Remember Nokia? Around the turn of the century they were the world leadin company for mobile phones.
I will resign from paid membership as well. I was using only community created courses and happily paid for the pro membership bonuses like the app and the offline mode. I also had my own private course to which I was adding new vocabulary just to use your platform. I am greatly disappointed. Can’t you just prepape a copy of the app with a different logo or something?
To be honest I wasn’t really the poweruser, so I was quite satisfied with the basic Memrise like creating courses helping me with university, learning in the subway or even in holidays when I didn’t have any network. I just hoped that Memrise would not go down the same path as Duolingo did with screwing up the users. Well maybe we meet again on another platform which doesn’t leave its user content to die on a mobile website.
I’m very disappointed about this decision. I’m a pro member, I only use the app and I only use community-created courses. I pay for an anual subscription so I have offline access to these community-created courses on the app. If these courses are removed from the app I won’t have a reason to continue renewing my subscription and I’ll definitely cancel it. And I hope you do refund people in this case because it’s a big deal to take so much content and with it the offline functionality away, especially on such a short notice.
It’s really sad to see how Memrise has changed since I started using it. The official Memrise courses might be good (I tried one or two but never finished them, so can’t say much about them) but what’s really special about Memrise are the community created courses which allow you to learn on an advanced level or allow you to learn languages for which no official course exists. First the ability to search these courses on the app was removed several months ago (you could still search and add them on the web though) and now they are moved to another platform. I think this is a bad decision.
Ridiculous. I’ve been a paid user for years and genuinely disappointed. I’ve already cancelled my subscription… what’s the point when you offer so few “official courses” and no offline mode for the new service.
It would be considered “unfair” by many - since the courses are community-made, then, why the paid subscription? Why not just offload these public created courses into Anki?
Follow the money. It’s crystal clear that the real goal is to isolate premuim features and increase paid subcriptions. I will be part of the churn (definately will cancel my subscription).
P.S. I have enjoyed being a multi-year subscriber, but the Memrise administration’s flowery ‘we-are-doing-it-for-benefit-of-everyone’ rationales make me puke. Businesses do things to increase profit. Period.
You can probably transfer that to Anki. I find Anki’s easier to add words to than Memrise, so if Memrise pushes on with this nonsensical change then you could get settled in to your new learning environment quite quickly
Yeah, I am considering to import my courses into anki as well. But it would be possible to leave the subsciption for decks like it is now for memrise and for memrise than the new model. So you would still have to pay for offline mode, just like now, and memrise could try to sell there courses in their main app
How could they hypothetically gain more profit by switching community courses to a free platform that requires constant internet for usage? The majority of the users use the community made courses.
I’ve used Anki, but I didn’t find it very use friendly so haven’t used it for over a year or two. I’ve never used decks created by other people. Is there an Anki website that hosts them or do you just have to find them? Is there a phone app or the ability to use it on a public computer? (Thinking in terms of technical poverty - eg no home computer - on the part of those who might want to use my courses)
I bought memrise pro so that I could use the offline mode but if the courses that I learn change to a website, I won’t be able to do that. I will still probably use decks but I am a student and it wasn’t exactly cheap, even though I got the pro version on a discount. Will I be able to get a refund?
I don’t like Anki because it has an awful UI and it doesn’t do any sort of automatic managing of terms and when they should be reviewed, which is what I like about Memrise. Memrise also has the question/answer format and multiple ways of posing those questions (eg. typing, selecting from list, selecting parts of words) which Anki also lacks. It’d be nice if there were other SRS options with similar function to Memrise out there, but Anki isn’t one.
Seriously, if people wanted another Duolingo, they’d use Duolingo. You’re not going to be able to compete with Duolingo by being just another Duolingo with A1 level “The cat lives in a red house” -type of content. User created courses are the only thing going for you Memrise.
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.