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?
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
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!
3 Likes
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.:
1 Like
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.)
2 Likes
I have looked into this and unfortunately the database field that stored this setting was cleared by a developer who thought it was unused. So people who had turned off audio tests previously have lost that preference.
Unfortunately that can’t be restored.
As such we will bring back the toggle in the settings earlier than we had planned, it should be in place early next week.
I am sorry for the inconvenience.
5 Likes
This is, BTW, one of the few reasons for me to use the web-app over the Android app at times as, on Android, you’re not able to skip the audio. This can slow down review and speed review sessions by an extreme amount, particularly when I have large amounts of items to review in a course.
Long story short: I do wish skipping audio was available on the mobile apps as well!
1 Like
Thank you for looking into it and listening to feedback!
1 Like
Excellent! Thank you very much!
And since I mean what I say, after it is restored, I will finally buy a membership of some kind. I’ve held off because I’ve never really had a need for the premium features for my particular workflow, but I’ll buy one anyways now just to show gratitude for having feedback be listened to! (And to show support for a site that I spend so much time on).
Once the toggle (or other appropriate method) is restored and confirmed working, I’ll mark your post as the solution. Thanks again!
There seems to be quite a bit of conflicting messaging going on here.
@James_g_memrise On the Reddit thread about this topic, you said “The option was removed as no one was using it so we simplified our systems.” But on here you say “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.” and later “The change to the settings page took place in December, but a lot of you are saying something yesterday?”
So, we went from nobody to a vanishingly small number to a lot of us complaining about something. Which is it? However many of us it is, it was enough to prompt a flurry of topics and messaging on otherwise dead forums.
“We hypothesised that…”
Did you consider asking the users?
“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.”
“As such we will bring back the toggle in the settings earlier than we had planned”
So you couldn’t justify the effort to reintegrate it, but despite not being able to justify the effort, you in fact planned to bring back the feature whose effort you couldn’t justify? Does that make sense to anyone?
As for why I always turn off the audio tests: I don’t need to practice recognizing which combination of letters is said. I need to know what it means. Sure, I could do this on my phone I guess, but there’s a couple problems. One, the screen is tiny. Yeah, phones are big now, but still far smaller than a monitor. Also, I can’t type on a computer keyboard with my phone.
2 Likes
My statements are not contradictory, all features add effort and complexity, and a key metric on deciding if we do that is how many users a feature has.
It was missed out of the rebuild as it wasn’t used by a lot of people so we saved time and complexity by not including it. We are a small company and have to make compromises, many of which we’d rather not do but we don’t have the resources to do otherwise.
The setting was kept on our backlog as a user story as many features are, many of which come from feature requests from this forum and other user communications. In an ideal world we would build everything on our backlog, but we prioritise based on effort and reward. Now we have moved building this toggle forward because of the unanticipated change that meant users who had previously used the toggle have had that state wiped so it would benefit more people.
I hope that clears the matter up for you.
2 Likes
I am also now (as of this morning) being forced to answer audio questions. This means I just have to close out the session I am doing and lose my progress when one pops up. It seems so far to be strictly when learning new words. My settings also have “no audio” selected, and I haven’t even seen an audio test in a year or more until this morning. I use the web version multiple times daily and have never had this problem before today.
(Side note: this is an accessibility issue, as well, and should really be prioritized for that reason alone. The hard of hearing do after all exist, and also use websites to learn things.)
1 Like
Then you will be absolutely thrilled to know that we already deployed the toggle to the learning settings two days ago
Boy, I sure would be if it were working at all. Please note that I did say this just started this morning, and that audio is toggled off. These are my settings as of two minutes ago:
And this is a screenshot of a Learn New Words session that I started about a minute later.
Thrilling, truly.
Did you try changing the toggle?
The copy is interim text at the moment while we await localisation so will be clearer by Friday, if you set the toggle to positive it will disable audio tests
Switching it on appears to have switched it off for now, thank you.
The text next to the button is very unclear at the moment because it’s formulated in double negative.
“when disabled you will not see”
Which lead me to believe that I should actually enable sound by setting it to the right.
But upon starting a review I got nothing. Just an empty results screen.
So it’s enable sound by keeping the button disabled to the left. 
I believe I addressed this.