I am presently taking the Japanese 1 course. As a beginner, is there any possible way to have the Hiragana words written above the words written in Kanji? I am presently living in Japan and understand the practical reason why learning Kanji is necessary. However, at the beginner level that I am at, I am not ready to learn Kanji and have never seen this much Kanji used at this beginner level of instruction. Thank you very much.
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Yeah. Ive noticed this too but ive just rolled with it. You could do non-official courses or do the no script Japanese with english letters
Thanks so much for replying! I can read and write Hiragana and Katakana, so I don’t want to use Ramaji. I may just choose to skip those words. Thanks again!
Wow. ive just started my journey in learning Japanese. Could you help me? Ive been learning Hiragana.
This is the course. im top this week 
Hi. Thanks for the information on the course. One of the reasons I am learning Japanese is because my wife is Japanese. So I guess I have an advantage over some people because she can help me. On the other hand, my brain struggles to remember all of the vocabulary, etc., so it is definitely not easy for me. I learned Hiragana and Katakana from a book (I don’t remember the name of it but I can find out if you are interested), which was good, but it seems like the Memrise course is good too. Thanks again for the course information and let me know if you would like the name of the book I used.
I would love to help but I don’t know enough to be very helpful. 
In my other reply below I said I didn’t remember the name of the Hiragana book I used, but I looked it up and it is called Japanese Hiragana & Katakana for Beginners by Timothy G. Stout. I liked that it gave good tips on how to remember each letter. I bought it on Amazon.
Ill look into that book 
I also noticed this and I hope that they change it. I had this course on my old iPod and I was learning and memorizing just fine with just hiragana at the beginning. It is distracting and it doesn’t help with pronouncing the words phonetically either. The old way was also a great way to practice learning hiragana. I think it may be too much at once for some.
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I totally agree…I think I will give up Memrise for now.
Why give up memrise?
I only have a certain amount of time to study. I don’t think that, as a beginner, it is useful for me at this time to learn “Mr ? is a genius!” where the person’s name and genius is in Kanji. I would rather spend my time learning the word genius without spending so much time trying to memorize the Kanji. But that is just me at this point in my studies. I was making good progress and enjoying Memrise, but the requirement to learn Kanji as part of their program made it inappropriate for me at this time.
Hello. Why do not you try some unofficial courses? I’ve made some suggestions for user-created sequential courses in the topic created by MarshallLanguages:
http://community.memrise.com/t/what-now/29551/3
But there are also some user-created courses that were based on books such as Genki or Minna no Nihongo. The initial courses do not have kanji, or else, the first half has words without kanji, and the other half, the corresponding kanji.
I’ll link to two of them, but there are other users who have created the course, and I’m still not sure which one is better.
There are many options in memrise, and I am still “exploring this world”. Do a search, and I believe you’ll find what fits you best 
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Hello @michaelyuda. I do not know if you have seen, but the official Japanese course has a new introductory course called “Japanese 0”. I only discovered the course today, but I think the course has a maximum of 2 weeks.
The course was made for beginners in Japanese, and has no kanji’s, except for the last level that has numerals in Kanji’s.
Thank you so much @milami! I will go check it out!
WOW! Thank you so much for taking the time to help me @Milamy. I really appreciate it. I had no idea that there were unofficial courses. I will check them out and thank you again!!!
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