Hi @kevin5284, what do you imagine the decks website to look like in 20 years? How will it be managed and maintained? I’d put more trust in it if that was made clear.
I would personally turn it into a non-profit. That is I think the most natural and enduring form of a forever free community driven website, like the decks website would be. That gives you the best basis for it to thrive on the effort of its volunteers.
Thanks for doing the experiment to verify that.
I have now installed Mobiwol (an Android firewall app) and disabled Memrise’s access to both wifi and mobile; I have previously turned off auto-updating in the Play Store.
I know at some point something will break and the thing will self-destruct… I’m hoping to just buy a few more months, until I can finish my Genki II course.
It’s a shameful day when my once-favourite app has to be quarantined and treated like a piece of malware.
We have no limit on languages other than what people want to develop! The reading side of the project, LARA, is generating a lot of interest already. We have three languages available to look at as samples: English, Icelandic and Farsi. If you look at the Icelandic sample you get the full functionality as developed so far. I’m about to start doing the audio for a larger English sample.
These particular languages because I can do English, and because we have an Icelandic teacher and a Farsi teacher who are already using LARA in their classrooms. I think it will be at least a month before the interface is at a point where it is really simple to use for content creation, but anybody interested who wants to dive in with some help from us can start now. We have a great audio tool for recording the audio, it’s extremely easy to use.
If you go to Icelandic in LARA you will see a screen divided into two. On the left, the text, along with the possibility of listening to audio, of both individual words and segments. When you click on words, on the right side of the screen you have all sorts of information at a word level including examples in context and a concordance.
Your progress will be kept track of, you will see whether this is a new word to you or if you should know it, etc etc etc.
We are working on hard languages at the moment (from a technical point of view) so that we can make the system available to as many languages as possible. Anybody reading this who is a native speaking Chinese person and would like to get involved, we’d love that!
Address for contact: Manny at [email protected]
Yeah, I never did get on with the app either. I have to use the alltype on web to actually learn properly. Half my time on Memrise (I only joined six to eight months ago, when I developed an actual interest in spending free time learning language instead of useless skills nobody will ever need!) has been spent on community courses, as the official ones are firstly a bit touristy and secondly don’t get difficult enough (they barely seem more difficult from 1 - 7, so it’s more like they just broke one big course up into separate parts rather than an actual division by difficulty level).
I used to buy a lot of books online, too, before even that became a frivolous habit I couldn’t afford. Business for me is slowly picking up but I have more important things than getting real paper books (even though I totally prefer them). If you have one of Amazon’s more fancy accounts, though, there are decent number of free ebooks and, of course, there are a few other projects that offer them over the web. I just do that, though I can’t say my foreign-language reading comprehension’s too great if the book is targeted at anyone not ten years old, lol.
I don’t think that this is terrible from a personal perspective (this move to D*cks) because the direct effect is for me minimal. But… I hear what people are saying and I can see it from their point of view: how awkward it will be for them to study, how they were paying for something that is now to be taken away with little warning, how they feel disregarded and as if Memrise is saying their courses really aren’t worthy of being on the main site anymore. That bother’s me. Especially as Memrise were so terse in response to their grievances. Tact goes a long way.
thanks.
It was the combination that was helpful for me. As a language trainer you know that people learn differntly.
We should stay with the topic and the used language in this post. 
^^THIS
I totally agree with you on this point. For the people who paid premium for the offline app, only to now be told that the community courses they were studying via the offline mode of the app are going to be taken away from them, yup, that sucks big time.
The bosses at the top of memrise have made a serious error of judgement on that one, there is no doubt about that.
We can only hope that the complaints voiced in this forum and elsewhere are getting to their ears and that they will find a way to address them.
The responses I have seen from kevin from memrise here in this thread are all totally civil and polite. I have never seen his name before, though, in the last five years, so he is certainly not one of the higher-up members, as far as I know.
As someone who curates a community course, I am pretty confident that the courses I have worked on are actually miles better than the Anglo-centric, culturally-unaware courses that memrise have produced
As far as I can tell from the Danish, Swedish and Dutch memrise courses I have dipped into, the memrise courses all follow the exact same format, which appears to be based on the kind of interactions you would see in a lesser-known American soap opera (“hi, you guys!”) and they don’t appear to touch on any cultural differences you might find AT ALL. Whatever language you learn with the memrise courses, you just learn this one-size-fits-all pap (as I say, I can only judge from these three European languages, maybe they do a better job with non-European languages and bring a little cultural awareness in).
Let’s hope that memrise publicises “Decks” so that new memrise learners can move on to more sophisticated content once they have done their beginners’ courses.
Thanks, Amanda. I did. It say 30 days or under only. I filled out the request anyway. We’ll see 8f they respond.
I wish you good luck!
I don’t see how they can reasonably refuse to give refunds, even if more than thirty days has elapsed. They’ve just made a massive change to the service – of course people who paid for something they can no longer have are going to want their money back! Not giving it to you would make them look pretty bad, in my opinion (and companies don’t usually want to look bad).
I’ve literally been using Memrise for over 8 years and have been paying for Pro since 2015.
“In creating Decks, we wanted first of all to honour our commitment to users who have been with us for a very long time and our respect and appreciation for the community-created genre of Memrise we created together. We wanted to ensure that this content is available forever.”
I do not feel appreciated.
Ismail: ‘Please stop.If you let greedy companies do whatever they like they’ll keep removing things and making bad changes that nobody asked about.We users is was made memrise as big as it is so they shouldn’t treat us like that.’
All these sorts of startups depend on developing a core membership which is discarded in this sort of way later. We are hoping that our own CALLector will be able to do better partly because it isn’t a for-profit, but also because it is going to be distributed and open source, permitting independence and control on the part of the user (whether learner, teacher or developer of content or technology). More here: LARA on CALLector
I had also been a pro user for just short of four years. Cannot understand the logic behind purposely alienating so many loyal customers.
First of all someone told you to stop being optimistic, and I just wanna say, go for it girl! Haha
While reading books and listening to podcasts is an excellent idea, and I would never recommend someone to ONLY use memrise to learn a language, a huge hurdle for many intermediate to advanced language learner’s is needing to know tons of vocab in order to read books or listen to podcasts. Memrise is that app for me, and i am currently using a course to drill vocab for a proficiency test that has over 4000 words. ( had no problem downloading to use offline) For me, flash card studying is not a " sit at my desk and study" kind of thing. We already spend so much of our time sitting that I would rather at least pace around while drilling vocab. I use textbooks and long form problems at my desk. I guess to each their own. Also, for me at least, i can ignore the taps and opt to use my phone keyboard if I want. Did you try this? Personally I just tap though since I am learning Japanese and am working on recognizing chinese characters anyway.
I hope decks doesn’t suck, but I am pretty skeptical that the mobile web version can even compare to the ease of an app. The current web mobile version is straight up garbage. ( try it out!)
You are missing the point. Nobody’s complaining about what it offers. But almost everyone saying that they prefer another way to learn. People in this thread have their reasons to use mobile app instead of pc or laptop.
(please, don’t advertise web version, at least not to me)
As a user who has used memrise more than 6 years I am totally disappointed. First they removed the free offline feature of the app and now only web based training for my personal courses. I mean what is wrong with you?
My private courses’s content is adjusted to my books and other ressources I use. I don’t care for official memrise apps! When you care for your community make a decks app with offline mode for FREE!
There’s a thread covering how to continue to use the app in off-line mode here:
“I know at some point something will break and the thing will self-destruct… I’m hoping to just buy a few more months, until I can finish my Genki II course.”
I still keep an iPad mini running from 2012 which has never been updated, it’s still usable for viewing YouTube videos through the browser.
Be optimistic, don’t underestimate the power of never updating!
Same here. Like a lot of the people posting on here have been using Memrise for years, and a lot of us are cancelling. They must be banking on attracting new users or something, which seems unnecessarily risky when you have such a loyal customer base already.
Agree with everything you say.
I maintain about seven courses for French and would equally be interested in backing up these courses.
Although I’m not sure how, do you have a link ?
Thanks in Advance
@MemriseSupport @tedcooke
Will there be automatic redirection links (301) from the old domain address of a community created course to the new domain address for the Decks platform ?
How will administrators and current users find their transferred courses ?
Will course administrators receive a mail or notification about the new links ?
Will course users receive a mail or notification about the new links ?
Can people still use the memrise.com community to discuss these courses ?
Thanks in advance for your answers to my questions.
Cathryn
Alias flamantrose user and creator since 2010.
Those funky growing flowers and Mem stream was a stroke of genius at the time with PROMISES of free lifetime pro access (never happened), charging for your own courses ? etc. etc… LOL
Well, by backing up I was referring to transferring them to Anki. If you are interested in that, I already talked in length about it here Important Update: Upcoming changes to Memrise community-created courses
This is the only way I am aware of, but I think there are other ways which might involve some sort of coding I’m not familiar with. I’m sure people in the community will come up with something.
