Important Update: Upcoming changes to Memrise community-created courses

Yes, you are right on the money. I use Memrise because it’s not Duolingo. I learn less commonly learned languages, like Basque, Georgian, and Amharic. I loved Memrise because it is easier than Anki, but not as specialized as Duolingo. Shifting resources from the less-commonly learned languages to the over-populated ones is sad to see. But it’s clearly following the money.

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Sarcasm???
tenor

forever… that what we thought at the begining about having memrise app…next year you will come up that you do not want to fund the decks and we are screwed … .hours of work lost…

I will believe that this is a “commitment” when I see skin in the game. If Memrise will refund my “pro” membership–which I bought because I want off-line community decks–then I will believe that this is actually a commitment.

You cannot guarantee that anymore. On the contrary, you are sending a completely different message to the Memrise community. You are quitting the main feature that made Memrise useful to most your users. Memrise courses cannot compete with the community created courses which are better and have more advanced content. By doing this… you are making Memrise useless when it was better than Anki or even Duolingo. 51

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No hard feelings to Memrise. I understand its a business decision. I wish you the best in the over saturated market of language learning apps/websites. But I will no longer pay for a subscription as I only did it to support the site. Lets be honest, Decks is the graveyard for community created courses. And I cant take the risk of keep on adding to my course and then Memrise shuts it down in a year or two. I will stick around to see how much effort is put into Decks but I plan on migrating my courses to other flashcard providers like Anki or quizlet.

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Anki. It’s not as cool as memrise, but it’s a thing you can use. At least it is compleetly free and it is open software so a lot of nice things are made by the community.

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@danielws so from mid-March, all your course progress for community courses will move to Decks. Course progress includes things like streak on a course, words learned on a course, daily goal on a course.

For your progress overall as a user, that will be forked. So imagine you have 25,000 points overall in mid-March, you’ll see 25,000 points on both Memrise and Decks. This overall progress will then move on a different trajectory on each site depending on your learning on each site.

Difficult to explain in a text box, but hopefully you get the idea

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The fact that there has been so much negative feedback on this must be something that Memrise would have anticipated - and must be a decision taken out of financial necessity.

Presumably this existing open-source model with content created by users isn’t sustainable financially - this is the saddest thing. I can’t imagine that Memrise would have taken this decision if they didn’t have to. A shame that something so popular and useful in the current form cannot survive in a commercial environment.

Decks might wither and die (the lack of an app and offline functionality huge obstacles) but we will have to wait and see. I am not optimistic.

The new Memrise will be one of a plethora of online learning apps that have arrived in a very crowded marketplace. I wish it the best to survive. But as per 99% of the comments above it won’t be the thing that we have paid for so it will have to attract a new audience.

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You’re right about me disagreeing with the decision to remove all of the hundreds of thousands of hours put into your app by the community and relocating every single last one of us to a different website.

I’ve always praised the Memrise team for their hardwork. I’ve always felt looked after by the a Memrise team. Because of this, I have always encouraged many people I know to not only download but pay for the premium service you provided.

But this decision to not provide an app is absolute lunacy. It’s unbelievable if anyone in the Memrise team thought this news was going to be well received.

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FWIW, I haven’t yet tried out Anki, but I’ve just looked them up. For those searching for it, search no further:

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I use it from time to time. In a way it is better than memrise but much harder to use. It’s like… having Windows(memrise) and Linux(anki). In this way… Memrise is much much better because it simplifies everything xD But yeah, I guess I’m changing back to Anki if this nonsense continues.

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I’ve long been a Pro user but I am today cancelling my subscription and have submitted a support request for a refund. The only reason I paid money into Memrise was to access community courses I love and some I even created offline. Without offline access, to me there is no Memrise. I can only hope you reconsider to decision to spin-off community courses. I’m a developer and I understand maintaining two apps would be a challenge, so surely the answer if you want to differentiate Memrise-created content from community-created content is to segregate them within the existing app and clearly brand them? This is an utterly baffling decision.

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I’m really wondering if they understand what they did. I mean, the news are a few hours old and there are already almost 400 negative comments, and various additional threads, where people complain.
If they really care about their users, they will reconsider…or at least bring a statement…
But from what it looks now, they don’t care…for whatever reason…can’t belive. It was such a great app and such a great concept, therefore I became a paid pro member…and now they just fuck it up…
Thank You!

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There are also apps like Quizlet (which I use alongside Memrise - I really like the fact that it has a built-in text to speech technology for all of the languages I’m learning - except for Icelandic) and Cram (it’s like Quizlet but it’s a bit more annoying to use imo - but it has audio for Icelandic)

Personally, I don’t like Anki because it isn’t user-friendly and creating courses using it is a pain in the rear part of the body :slight_smile:

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I have been using this app for years and I am so sad this is happening. I created many courses myself for some time and they have approx. 1800-2000 words… Decks might be the same thing as they state it but just seeing how they ignore their users is really sad. I lost all love for this company and I hope they change their opinion about this (which I doubt it, as I can see it…)

Sadly, gonna try to find alternatives close to it

Anki has offline usability.

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Ok, I may be will repeat things other people already wrote.

I payed to Memrise to have at least some possibility to get better experience for difficult words, statistics and “learn with locals”.

I compared Memrise to WordSteps, and the last one had much better possibilities to learn words:

  • you choose set of dictionaries and amount of words for each session
  • you choose the set of exercises you want to use before each session
  • it will not let you go until you’ll write the word correctly

That was giving me much better speed of remembering words, plus it helped to go quicker through words I was already familiar.

In Memrise its only 5-10-15 and 10-20-50 per studying/repeating, “don’t use writing tests” doesn’t apply to studying mode - so if I already know the word, I have to waste time to enter it 2-3 times. And if the word is too difficult - Memrise will only show it to you once or twice more and that’s it. Go learn it again on your own.
But well, WordSteps is unsupported anymore and Memrise has a wide community. So I payed to Memrise to at least have this additional speed tests and difficult words and some beginners-level built-in courses with locals.

And now everything I payed for - will disappear? I learned words in app in places without any signal, waiting for doctors appointment, in subway, etc. I combine Memrise courses with my own, so when I repeat words I don’t even see the difference from which dictionary it goes. “Book” was in one course, “Books” - in other, but I got their combination in exercises. Now I should jump between two sites?

I don’t understand what should I pay for now? Your predefined courses are below any level of simplicity! For German it is not even A1! And no matter how good you’ll try to make them - they will never cover the needs of those who study language, as everyone is going through their own program and has own purposes. I have my own plan of studying language, my own teachers, courses at work, books - I’ll never buy some generic predefined course from you nor anyone else. Now I need general words for A1, plus words to read contracts and for software development for my work. Later I’ll need something for psychology and woodworking. You’ll never meet those needs.

I’d pay a lot of money to simply have possibility to combine my own course out of predefined words with audio. It takes so many time, energy and effort to build a course now! Copy-paste words, all the forms, times, conjugations, download audio, convert audio (you don’t support all formats!), cut audio (your recording doesn’t work even if I turn on Flash in my brawser - your developers forgot to put somewhere correct crossdomain.xml)… And all the time I find I made a mistake.
I was going even to pay to some student to help me fill the words from the book we are using in my courses. To pay for something, you could implement out of the box by buying few popular languages dictionaries with sound! This is the real place where you could make money!

Also, add real modern texts with audio and possibility with one click add words from this text to course (automatically filtering out words I already know). There are so many free audios and tezts for that purpose! This is the most efficient way to learn any language: read, listen, learn words, use them.

The content - is the only thing I’m going to buy! The content that I can easy combine and group, where I can easy mark words that I already know very good or know but wan’t to repeat from time to time or difficult words, where I can add additional words as I wish. For most of popular languages it is easy to define groups of words and automatically add them and test: plural/single, feminine/masculine, verbs - time/conjugations - why should I always enter “ich/du/er” if there can be one form with 7 fields for them all? And it works similarly for many popular languages.

What are you going to become? Another Duolingo? I have a Duolingo, for free. I need something to learn words. A lot of words, my own set of words, efficiently and without thinking much what should I do for that. And now it feels you don’t need me and my money.

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As a long time user, I cannot possibly express how awful I felt reading this news.
As of last night, I was using nine courses. Only two of them are Memrise produced content. My primary interest is in languages Memrise does not create content for. There is NO REASON for me to continue being a Memrise subscriber to be able to use one or two courses offline. My own ability to use Memrise is going to be severely negatively impacted. I have been an evangelist of Memrise for eight years, have helped Ben Whatley in troubleshooting the app when it was not syncing correctly many years ago. I got my husband to finally become a Pro user as well.

Shaking my head that you essentially chose to destroy your business model and the feature that made Memrise invaluable to so many people to lower your operational costs. Many devoted users will be just shattered by these changes. You need an app and offline capability for “Decks” if you expect to retain your user base.

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I’m pro member since 2015.
Year ago i have a first notice about that way - Memrise remove adding community course from the app.
When my subscription ended in 2018 , i’m thinking about renewing 2 month, and renew again.
I use 75% of community courses, primarily because my native language is not English, and for him there are generally few courses, most of which are created by the community.
I have no problem accessing the internet 95% of the time online and I could use the non-pro version. I have a subscription to maintain Memrise itself.
And of course the application or site? Of course the application.
Sadly, the new model has nothing attractive …

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