Continuing the discussion from Legal Issues - Copyrighted Material? (Germany):
I have the same question but in a broader sense.
Is it legal, to make a Memrise course with sentences (cut into pieces) out of a
book (a novella or a story, not a language book) which is translated into many languages (with different publishers from many different countries).
Depends on which country 
However, although many countries don’t have the American concept of “fair use” in their copyright law - and it’s not required by treaty - the Internet seems to have adopted fair use as a general guideline despite that. People generally treat it as if it applies on the Internet worldwide, even though it legally does not apply in many countries. It’ll be interesting to see some courts test that. It would be much better if fair use were extended worldwide by treaty, but we just missed a grand opportunity to do just that: the TPP makes all signatories agree to extend their copyright terms to the ridiculously long US terms (life of author + 70 years, or 95 years after date of publication) but only makes a mention of how nice fair use is without requiring anyone to have it.
These questions are complicated, and the answers unique to the specific circumstances.
First, remember that even in the USA, which has a fairly robust concept of Fair Use, this isn’t a right that will prevent someone from suing you, or which gives you license to use someone else’s copyrighted material without question. Instead, it is a legal defense that can be raised if you are sued, but the burden of proof is on you to prove that your use is indeed fair. Whether the court and jury will agree with you is an open question.
An analysis of what constitutes Fair Use takes into consideration many factors, including the extent of the material copied in relation to the whole work, the impact of the copying on the market value of the work, the purpose of the copying, e.g, is it for use for discussion inside a university literature class, or is it being used on a website for commercial gain, etc., is the use of the work transformative in nature, does it add value to the original work, and many more.
In the case of excerpts from a novel, or short story, if you used a couple of sentences at random in a much larger language course, it would probably be ok, but if you copied a lot of sentences sequentially, constituting more than a percent or two of the whole text, then that could spell trouble.
But regardless of what you do, if a publisher with a lot of resources were to sue you, you would be forced to hire a lawyer to defend yourself, which would be very costly, even if you ultimately win.
Regarding your question about copyright of facts - as your friend said, facts themselves cannot be copyrighted. But a particular selection, sequence, and organization of facts can be copyrighted if it reflects some minimum amount of creativity. E.g. - a telephone directory listing names alphabetically with numbers cannot be copyrighted, because an alphabetical listing is essentially required, and reflects no creativity. But a list of the most useful French phrases for travelers, reflects editorial judgment and creativity, so that probably would be eligible for copyright protection.
@cos and @xvg11
Thanks
a lot to both of you, for your detailed answers, much appreciated.
Under this circumstances sure enough I am not going to publish any such a course.
It’s was just a nice idea but it’s not worth any of this possible troubles.
Good night and thanks
I doubt you need to worry too much about the copyright. A rights-holder would (probably) need to send a cease-and-desist notice to Memrise before doing anything and then it would be on Memrise to decide what to do next.
In practice, the more recent the work and the more popular the work, the more likely the rights-holder is to pursue action.