are you serious? you think we have time or we have to spend our time to correct memrise mess? why memrise wouldn’t put simply an option on the setting?
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OK, maybe there’s no need to through around the C word so much, it’s only an update, things can come back to normal pretty quickly.
That being said people have been complaining pretty vocally for a week now and the Memrise team still has not replied, if nothing else to tell us to fuck off or at the very least to defend their choice. Why?
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Phrases longer than 15 characters for Official Memrise courses will no longer have typing tests.
I’d like to voice my disappointment with this change. Typing tests are a valuable component for committing phrases to memory. Without this the product will not meet my needs and I’ll have to cancel my pro membership.
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Was Memrise useful to your learning? Would you like to continue learning the way you used to?
Then I think that it could be profitable for you to spend that time to “correct the mess”.
Asking “do we have to” is the wrong question, I think – assigning fault or blame for a mess is not helpful if your goal is to learn a language (or learn biology facts or whatever you were practising).
If you do not have the time to do that, then you will have to spend time to find something else that teaches you at least as well – that’s also time that has to come from somewhere. (Unless you already know of a resource that is at least as good as the original was.)
Or you can decide that you don’t want to learn any more. That’s also a valid decision.
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The one big issue I have with memrise is that exercises are way too easy especially after I already spent a while on a course.
And now you even disable typing for anything that is not trivial???
Usually I can guess the correct answer from context alone, for example by available letters on the on-screen “keyboard” or by multiple choice options that are just obviously way off.
That’s why memrise also fails to detect which words are really difficult to me.
I was about to propose an option to disable the on-scren letters or maybe automatically hide them on repeat-lessons,
I have a big passive vocabulary by now, but I fell I am stuck in my progress because memrise exercises are too easy.
Looking forward to the immersion mode coming to Swedish, but otherwise I am looking for alternative ways to learn and advance.
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@eekboom why don’t you do your own courses … there are still typing tests on user-made courses. You do not have to use memrise-made courses for learning
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@Atikker I am not really sure what to make of that answer. By the same logic if I think a book is boring I should rather write a more interesting one myself?! I want to learn Swedish not bother myself with maintaining a course myself.
I do have vocabulary in a google sheet and use that for learning, too.
I really hope memrise is listening to all of its user, not just the beginners who might like the easy (but shallow) success of trivial exercises.
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you misunderstood me… not a new interesting one… just copy those more than 15 characters long sentences to your own course
of course there are always people who find mistakes everywhere and whine about
I hope you are not that kind
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Hi @eekboom, as has already been said (but you may not have seen the post) there are lots of other courses created by users, so hopefully you will find what you are looking for that has already been created by someone else.
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Brilliant idea @Atikker
just copy those more than 15 characters long sentences to your own course
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you just don’t read that book… there are hundreds of books there… why keep the boring one and feel bad about it…search for new and better one
I’m trying to understand the outrage…
Memrise has many thousands of community-built courses. You can probably find a course that meets your tastes.
Memrise also makes their own courses. In these courses, Memrise is continually using their data to re-structure the learning in ways that have been shown to work best for most learners. In the official Memrise courses, they have apparently decided that learning to spell words and learning to put words in the right grammatical order are two separate learning tasks, and they expect to achieve better results for most learners by separating these two tasks.
You still learn how to recall and spell all the words, right? And you still will be tested on how you assemble the words into sentences right? You’re just upset that these tasks will not be simultaneous?
And, as mentioned above, it’s actually pretty simple to cut and paste the sentences into a new course if you really want to practice sentence structure and spelling simultaneously. It’s not like you have to write new sentences.
You can self-manage your learning all you want, continually evaluating what works best for you. Or you can relax and delegate the management part to Memrise software.
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Lurajane, could you tell us a little bit more about how Memrise uses data to restructure learning? Piles of data still depend on wise analysis and application, so if you have insights into the inner workings of Memrise decision making, it would be really great to know. Especially about how spelling v ordering v simultaneous works for or against efficient learning, about which you imply some conclusions. Otherwise, it’s a bit naive to trust that all must always be for the best because the grownups surely know what they’re doing . . .
It’s not anything like ‘outrage’. I paid for something that was helping me learn, and now I’m I’m getting something different that does’t help me learn. Many organisations find feedback like this helpful, and so we’re feeding back in the space provided, in case it provides a realty check against whatever data they might have . . . if anyone’s listening.
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Well, it seems that many are disappointed with disabled typing for longer phrases. So am I. Maybe users should be given a choice, it’s not that complicated.
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This sort of thing (some people not liking how certain features work because they are too easy for them) is also a perennial topic on Duolingo forums, since Duolingo also continually uses their data to re-structure the learning in ways that have been shown to work best for most learners.
I suspect that the shared “problem” here is that many learners are “casual” learners – they say they want to learn a language but if it gets too difficult they will quit.
So if there are ten casual learners and two dedicated learners, then optimising a course for ways that will “work best for most learners” will mean “make things work best for casual learners, let them make little tiny progress steps but don’t make it too difficult otherwise they will tend to give up”. So the course is easier – and this often frustrates the more dedicated learners who would prefer more a challenging course.
In general, using numbers and data to target a course difficulty at the median learner will probably lead to this frustration from faster learners or those who would like to put in more time and effort in exchange for faster/“deeper” progress.
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the only difference is that here memrise made the test very easy and trivial with no learning value. and we complain about why it becomes very easy.
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thanks for advise. yes new upgrade turned the memrise next to useless for lots of subscribers. this could have been avoided simply by introducing an option in the setting.
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The alterations to the Memrise courses are likely to be permanent and introducing more options for learners would involve a lot of work so I can’t see that happening.
What I would suggest to Memrise @BeaTrisy is that they create adjunctive courses containing the long sentences that can then be used for typing. Much better than every learner that wants the typing to create their own course.
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there’s actually already a button to get rid of the memrise keyboard (usually on the top right of the screen, a bit tough to spot because tis white on white) press it and your normal screen-keyboard should appear
Nope, at least on my smartphone (Galaxy Note) that does not hide the memrise keyboard. It just shows the native keyboard beneath the memrise keyboard.Most of the time only the “memrise space bar” gets covered by the native keyboard.