The rebuilt Listening Skills is now in Alpha. There are still a few things to be added before beta that we’re working on but here is early sight of it. Your thoughts and feedback are welcome.
Turning off audio questions for 30 minutes is a feature that will be added in an upcoming release.
Listening skills is not yet as mobile optimised as we would like but that is one thing we’re not too concerned about as it is still only a tiny minority of users who choose to do learning sessions on a mobile device without using the Memrise app.
It has been tested on the two most used browsers by Memrise fans (Chrome and Firefox). It has not been tested yet on Safari, Edge or other browsers. If you are using one and spot an issue, please say and share screenshots or a recording so it can go into a prioritisation process along with other issues.
One immediate comment Adam, that refers to current reviews on both the web and the App is that it would be good to increase the number of dummy answers - just three or four to choose from makes it very easy to answer.
The same applies to dummy words to choose from - not just the right ones to be picked in the right order…
There is lots of room on the web version for more options to be shown.
Typing single words [or even a couple of words] (with no prompting) is obviously a good option
A couple of observations from trying it out on Spanish (Spain)1:
When presented with a typing test, the in-browser keyboard doesn’t include a space-bar.
Tapping tests which included exclamation marks had the inverted exclamation mark as an integral part of the first word of the phrase, which is a ‘giveaway’. Presumably, it’s the same with question marks? A long-standing issue, I know.
The feint flower icon ‘pulses’ briefly after a correct answer but remains feint and otherwise unchanged. There might be a better way of indicating a correct answer.
I miss the notification of how many points I have earned for answering the question.
It just gives me a revised total.
Also, as commented elsewhere, if the question is in the foreign language (and asked to identify the foreign phrase or tap the foreign words), it would be nice to briefly see the English (or native language) translation.
The web doesn’t have a Dark Mode. It’s something that might come in the future. The Android app and iOS app are both built in native mobile programming languages, so are technically and feature-wise separate to the Memrise web app experience.
The yellow ‘play’ triangle does not disappear when the video starts — it stays over the video even as it is playing. (Safari 14.0.2 on Big Sur.)
And, another strange layout thing: in the ‘rearrange the words’ sentence exercises, it’s incredibly weird and frustrating that the collection of unselected words continually drops further and further down the screen as the sentence above is filled in. Every time I move the mouse to select the next word, I have to move further and further away! Odd, and not very helpful.
Is there a way to disable and presently return to the old normal listening skills? I do not have the beta box checked in my settings but any time I do a listening skills review from a browser on the PC I end up in the alpha version.
It really slows me down since I get to those that do not allow me to type answers and force me to click on words. I can use the number row on they keyboard to select words, but this is cumbersome, especially with long sentences, the number pad doesn’t work, and even if do select everything using the keyboard, I still have to move my hand over to the mouse because the enter key will not enter the answer until I click somewhere else on the page (it will only replay the audio).
This is the only issue I’ve seen with the alpha/beta version of the new listening tests. I like these types of tests on the mobile version, but not the web version. If I could disable this specific part of the listening skills so that it is only multiple choice and typing (more similar to the old version) it would work out much better for me.
Hello,
even though I really liked the old design the new one is very cute.
I understand that there’s still some bugs to figure out but one thing I’m greatly missing is seeing my own mistakes. There is no longer a way to compare what exactly I did wrong, which is especially frustrating when you’re trying to learn the correct sentence structures. I would highly appreciate if you reintroduced that little section again.
Also the buttons on the page aren’t as responsive, i guess, as in the old version which makes the review sessions less smooth and over all it takes a little longer. But I’m sure other people have commented on this before.
I highly enjoy your site and I recommend it to all my friends who consider learning a language. Thank you for all the great work
