Attempting to load the learning settings page on web gives a page with heavily simplified CSS. I assume this is not how it’s intended to look (unless it’s aiming for an extremely minimalist style). I’m using Chrome with language set to French, but I imagine the same result is true for other browsers and languages, too.
The “100” option for classic reviews is gone. (Which is what I’ve previously set mine to, which is why it looks as if I have nothing selected in the row). It’s possible that this is intentional. It seems to only have a visual (front-end) effect; I still receive 100 reviews per session.
Audio/video toggles are gone, too, and unlike the review count option, this seems to have an actual effect rather than just being a visual bug. As of about 15-30 minutes ago, I’ve started getting audio lessons where I’ve previously only dealt with multiple choice and typing tests. This is what led me to check the lesson settings page in the first place.
It’s possible this might also be an intentional change, but if it is, I strongly disagree with it. I’m not always able to listen while doing lessons, and so not having a toggle makes it effectively impossible to complete lessons sometimes (without spamming “hint” to bypass the audio reviews, etc).
Thanks in advance, and I hope some of these issues can be looked into/potentially fixed.
1- it is supposed to look that way, the new version of memrise which you will all son have access to does away with the beige.
2-The number of words to review was aligned with mobile, if you had a different value selected before you will keep that until you change it, though you won’t be able to return to 100
3- the audio toggle was removed during the rebuild as a vanishingly small number of people used it so we couldn’t justify the effort to reintegrate it. We hypothesised that almost everyone has ready access to headphones today, and worst case if you don’t then you have 2 options, first do speed review where you don’t need audio, or assuming you’re not at home at this point then use the mobile apps where you can disable audio still.
Hi James,
But I have courses where the words do not have audio files, so there is no way to complete the learning process. How is one meant to proceed? At the moment I am unable to learn further words properly with courses created by others as well as by myself.
Regarding point number 3, the ability to toggle audio questions on and off is critical in my opinion. Sometimes you just want to clear your reviews as quickly as possible, having to click around and listen for the correct option when you already know the answer is “Lo zucchero” is honestly annoying. Also for some reason like 90% of the time the correct answer is number 3, so you just wasted a good 15 seconds instead of just clicking “the sugar”.
I am trying to learn these 15 words. They do not have audio files behind them. I am therefore having to click “I don’t know” each time it asks me what word is associated with the sound (Because clicking on the sound of course plays no sound as there is no sound).
1 - Alright, I’ll take your word for it… But it’s a little TOO minimalist in my opinion. There’s no link to any other pages except back to the dashboard, there’s extremely little color (though beige probably wasn’t perfect either), and with the lack of audio settings, etc. there’s very few options actually available. At this point it seems like it could just as easily be turned into another tab on the main settings page.
2 - I figured this was probably the case, but I wanted to note it anyways in case it wasn’t.
3 - Speed reviews are not speed lessons. There’s no option to disable audio for lessons. And even if only a few users use an option, why is that a reason to remove it? This is like Mems all over again, but at least those may have had some overhead involved with moderating them for vulgar/hateful/etc content. This is literally just a toggle. WHAT effort? I have programming experience and know that unless you’ve implemented reviews in an extremely spaghetti-code or otherwise non-modular format, this should take a single programmer at most an hour to implement and test. It should literally just require adding a branch condition so that audio tests are only added to the lesson/review pool if a particular user variable is set, and nothing more.
“Sometimes you just want to clear your reviews as quickly as possible”
In that case I would highly recommend using ‘speed review’, which also doesn’t need audio to proceed
Thank you for raising that, that is a bug where we shouldn’t be loading an audio test if there is no audio file. We will look at that issue directly, users having to go to settings and turn off audio is not an appropriate solution.
while audio review as such is a wonderful idea, i have to repeat my old criticism: it is poorly implemented.
Absurd that i have to click “bort” when I hear “bort”, without any clue what “bort” might mean… Another “improvment” made by devs who never learned a language with their own product… sorry, dear devs but you had 11 or 12 years at your disposal to make a good audio review, and still… and to take away options from your users, again and again, till none at all is left, this is … not very nice.
edit: it seems one gets almost only audio reviews now, regardless of course, language etc. Jesus Maria!
Why you made these settings in the dropdown menu unclickable? You can’t open them in another window using the mouse wheel. So if you are looking for something, but don’t know where it is, you have to go to a page in this menu, then go back to the main page, open another page in the menu… It’s such a fail.
Thanks. I agree turning off audio in settings isn’t an appropriate solution… because it isn’t turned on for me anywhere… yet I face this situation.
Do you have an approx timeline as to when this will be fixed?
This “change” today has put an immediate stop to me being able to use Memrise.
Do you mean the same speed review which doesn’t require typing, and thus drills recognition rather than recall? And which has a timer which does little more than add stress, especially for cards that you may not have seen in six months? Hardly a solution…
And again, speed reviews are not speed lessons. Before today, I could tear through lessons, spending an average of half a second or less on each multiple choice card. Now, I have to wait for audio to play which adds potentially an extra several seconds before I can answer. I like getting listening practice on other sites and in general isn’t something that I think should be directly SRSed. This nukes my workflow. Duolingo can manage disabling audio at least temporarily and they’re hardly the pinnacle of language learning (they don’t even have SRS!). If they can do it, why can’t Memrise, especially for a ‘new and improved’ version?
I realize I’m a free user so I probably don’t have much leverage here. Would buying a lifetime membership help? I legitimately would, today, if it came with a promise that the ability to disable audio lessons/reviews would, PERMANENTLY, come back. With how much I use this site I probably should have years ago but changes like this scare me off every single time.
…And something tells me that “vanishingly small number of people” happen to be your power users… Just like the ones who used Mems…
I honestly wonder as to what hasn’t allegedly been analysed and found to be used by next to no one. Once again a feature-removal where it probably took more time to remove the said feature than to “reintegrate” it. Kudos - the next coffin nail is in place.
I stopped learning for about two years because this product was unusable anymore. First I deleted the app, because offline courses were dropped(never worked completely). I stopped my contract. I used the website, but they were not able to fix the word sorting text (until now!). Some weeks ago I started again reviewing 10.000 words from time to time some. But after some weeks it is as always, they activated audio tests I never used! And the answer from memrise is like always expected… so I’m going to interrupt again for the next years… to force me to use headphones is not userfriendly…
I usually have headphones on but deliberately turn off audio for many courses because for those courses I’m trying to learn vocabulary, not always pronunciation. So now I’m getting tests where there’s a choice of audio, but with no text, and just have to guess? Sorry, but this is a really bad change. It’s not just an “audio toggle.” It’s effectively a reconstruction of the tests themselves in a way that makes them unusable. If the only way to get around this is to use only my own self-created tests, then so be it. But why, Memrise?
I would love an option to select the frequency of audio tests, like this for example:
Audio test frequency (when available):
Never - Sometimes - Often - Always
This way we could actually shift our focus from listening comprehension to reading/writing skills whenever we would want to. When learning a new language with new kind of writing system I prefer to see the text whenever I review something, especially when the language pronunciation might not always match the spelling like in Arabic or in Russian.
But you guys aren’t interested in adding features, just removing them until this is just another braindead app to learn basic greetings and how to book a hotel, just like every other language learning app out there - none of which are for serious language learners and polyglots. Removing user options and control over our preferred learning methods is a bad move. I have been paying a yearly subscription for over half a decade at this point, and I’m very disappointed right now and seriously debating whether to continue my premium membership.
I’ve cancelled my subscription and highly suggest everyone else does the same. Hopefully that will disable this permanently. I never want audio tests. If I needed to hear the audio I’d turn my sound on.
Also, it goes without saying this is an accessibility nightmare. You guys do understand deaf and hard of hearing people also learn languages, yes? Do you think they appreciate having this crap forced on them?
Edit: I may as well explain WHY I don’t like audio tests or having the audio in general a lot of the time, just to make sure James or whichever other staff member is reading this understands why this change upsets people who are actually taking this seriously. Not that I expect them to bother to listen to anyone, but I do hope they feel bad!
At the moment, I’m learning two JLPT N4 (Japanese) courses - JLPT N4 Vocab and Readings - both of which are super reliant on you actually being able to read the text you’re presented with. I do not need the audio to know how these words are pronounced. In fact, hearing the audio instead of reading text (or hearing it first) is essentially ruining what these courses are supposed to do, so I pretty much always have it muted. Every second chunk of words in the Vocab course is for kanji correlating to the previous set of words, so you’re supposed to be able to read them and then recall the previous words to remember what they mean. This builds recall ability. Audio recognition is meaningless when I already know how it’s pronounced. It’s not necessarily a terrible thing to look at the list of words and guess as to what it might be, it’s all reading practice, but it’s certainly not anywhere as useful.
The Readings course is the same thing for all 500 ish words. I’m doing it to help myself recognise the kanji I’ve already learned in the other N4 course a month or so ago. Because of how Readings is structured, the audio questions are replacing the questions I actually need with ones that are 100% useless; it’s now forcing me to type out hiragana, something I can read totally fine because I’m not a complete beginner, without the kanji involved at all as there’s no reading component of these questions. Previously I would be given a kanji and asked to type out or select the pronunciation. Now I get that every third question.
If I keep hitting “I don’t know”, it just stunts my progress on stuff I need to get through, and if I actually guess and answer the question as intended, I’ve lost valuable chances to actually work on what I’m trying to learn.
Thanks for the totally useful update to your website!
Can I clarify something please
The change to the settings page took place in December, but a lot of you are saying something yesterday? There was no deliberate change in behaviour yesterday so if you are experiencing something new we can look into that
We already have the bug reported above where audio tests are being shown when there is no audio file, but has something else changed yesterday?
Yesterday I went from not getting any audio reviews ever (see my thread about the bug) into mostly getting audio reviews only to the point of it being annoying and slowing down the learning/reviewing process a lot. Out of 10 reviews, 6-7 are now audio. I preferred the bugged version except for when the bug prevented me from learning new words in some courses.
To clarify, I don’t mind audio reviews if I can control how often I get them. Switch from no audio reviews to almost purely audio reviews is too much.
EDIT: Also the audio reviews are this type of reviews now, where you don’t even see the correct answer in target language written out. This makes Russian reviews very hard for me as I’m not yet fully comfortable with Russian sounds and writing, seeing the actual Russian text would be helpful.:
Prior to yesterday, I would receive only multiple choice and typing tests when doing lessons and reviews. My lesson routine would consist of approximately 5 multiple choice questions followed lastly by 2 typing tests, per card, scrambled between 10 cards. My review sessions consist of a single typing test per card. After each correct answer, audio can be played, if it exists and if enter is not pressed to skip it. Usually I skip it, but if I’m curious about pronunciation I’ll wait around to listen to it. This is the way I’ve configured it in the past, by selecting to give preference to typing tests and to disable audio tests (back when the option existed).
As of yesterday, I now receive audio tests during lessons. (Reviews still seem to be entirely visual typing tests, but I haven’t as of yet tested enough to confirm.) This slows down the pace of lessons drastically since these tests (which are quite frequent) require you to listen to at least 1 audio queue (for audio → word) and potentially up to 4(!) (for word → audio). This changes something that is previously a near-instantaneous-almost-reflexive half a second long process (of seeing the prompt and pressing a single button for 1 of 4 answers) into a process that can potentially take several seconds. This isn’t so bad for a single card, but when you’re learning 200+ cards in a session (very typical for me), this can turn a process that might only take an hour into one that could take two or three.
I naturally assumed that this had something to do with the lesson settings page since that’s where I initially disabled audio tests. If I am misunderstanding the source of this change, then I apologize for the confusion. (I hadn’t seen the lesson settings page since before December). It seems plausible that the audio-less preference remained functional for those who had previously set it before it was removed (presumably in December) and that as of yesterday either the preferences somehow became reset for (some subset of) users or the internal functionality of skipping audio tests was removed entirely (perhaps accidentally).
(That said, I wouldn’t mind if one of the two typing cards were replaced with an audio card since typing usually takes a few seconds anyways, but replacing the multiple choice, as is currently the case, slows things down drastically.)
