Community site?
The one thing I’m concerned about, other than the lack of an app and offline mode, is how exactly decks is gonna be “free”. Surely the memrise won’t be paying for the storage otherwise they wouldn’t have handed over most of the courses to decks, so in that case how is decks gonna be able to host the content if it’s free? Will there be annoying ads? Or something even worse like locking away some of the stuff in our own courses behind a paywall?
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Suspect targeted ads, first a few and then after a while it looks like CNET or Tumblr with tons of popups, or then even a Medium begging screen for membership…
I’m on the edge of a group at Geneva University which has been given a pot of money to develop a community site for CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning). It’s going to be for developers and users of content, in that sense like Memrise. It’s going to focus on LARA (a language reading assistant which we are developing) and speech (via Alexa and other options). We anticipate that it will be very useful for teachers who need to develop their own content and have total control over it. We are already testing hard languages: Icelandic and Farsi in conjunction with teachers in Iceland and Iran.
Our hope is that it will be a very ethical community network from our point of view, focussed on user control, open source code etc. We’ve written about this, presented in the EU, and will be able to make stuff available to beta users shortly. We’d welcome core Memrise users, especially content developers, as beta testers, so if you’d like to be contacted about that, please send a note to Manny Rayner [email protected]
I’m on the edge of a group at Geneva University which has been given a pot of money to develop a community site for CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning). It’s going to be for developers and users of content, in that sense like Memrise. It’s going to focus on LARA (a language reading assistant which we are developing) and speech (via Alexa and other options). We anticipate that it will be very useful for teachers who need to develop their own content and have total control over it. We are already testing hard languages: Icelandic and Farsi in conjunction with teachers in Iceland and Iran.
Our hope is that it will be a very ethical community network from our point of view, focussed on user control, open source code etc. We’ve written about this, presented in the EU, and will be able to make stuff available to beta users shortly. We’d welcome core Memrise users, especially content developers, as beta testers, so if you’d like to be contacted about that, please send a note to Manny Rayner [email protected]
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That would make a lot of sense. They can generate ad revenue this way but they need content. Pro-members on here obviously wouldn’t stand for the ads but instead of making Memrise a ‘pay-to-get-rid-of-ads’ site, they filch all the community content, shove it on a sad side site and generate the revenue that way.
…
@cathyc – Thank you for the info. This sounds like an intriguing project and would love to know more, though unsure if I could truly be any help. I have many different skills but am sort of mid-level (at best) in all of them (except p*ssing people off – I’m awesome at that); I couldn’t be considered an expert in anything in particular, I’m afraid.
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Thanks for the info about the CALL system at Uni of Geneva. Sounds very promising, indeed!
I should add that I am glad that memrise intends to continue to host our community courses for free. That’s great! It’s just disappointing to lose what you had and I’m concerned that it will be the beginning of a slow death due to reduced utility, reduced accessibility and either ads or lack of maintenance.
How funny. Just last week, I dropped my subscription to Babbel because the lower level more or less uniform content wasn’t getting me anywhere. It is a shame that Memrise is downgrading one of the few things that differentiate them from a thousand other language apps. As 2/3 of the courses I’m studying are community created and my main use for the app was doing lessons when decent bandwidth is not available, I’ll be joining the exodus.
excuse me sir, I am paying the sub to use the app when i am on the sub…
or maybe when I hide in a storeroom at work with no signal. The app has to work offline.
To be fair, Memrise has its issues as an UI, it’s good for learning words and phrases but not at all useful to learn to put together sentences – as my wife pointed out and stopped using Memrise. So there’s indeed a place for a better memory learning system out there which is community based.
true words
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.
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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?
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Hey Memrise, wake up! What are you thinking? Why?! I bet you’ll regret it!
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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.
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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.
We’re really excited about it!
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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]