The least you can do at the moment is to postpone for a year this decision about introduction of the Decks. It was highly unethical move in regards to many users who have paid for your services.
These users must have been warned in advance about all the future developments. Some people bought lifetime subscriptions and that’s another problem. Are you going to deal with them?
You have your business plans, but we have our learning plans and you should respect that. (if you are hard and fast about Decks then give us more time to find an appropriate alternative).
But it’s not about money. You let down a lot of loyal users who have invested their time and efforts into course creation and were expecting to learn them via apps/offline mode. For example, personally I have an English course: to add 40 words into it takes about 1,5-2 hours (there are 1600 words already) of my free time and I don’t get paid for it.
These users are really love your app/website, they are spending hours and days learning languages (yeah, this is some kind of romance we are talking about).
Do you understand it or you are some sort of cynical digital capitalists?
Apparently, you are changing Memrise into another run-of-the-mill language portal, but there are hundreds and thousands of them. You are very good in this niche of memorizing things, it is your mission and you are still the best (just look how painful it is to find an alternative).
Why are you doing it? Why are you betraying your mission?
Some harsh questions for your senior members:
Why are you doing everything to destroy your Android app? (almost every big update is a fudging disaster)
Why are you ignoring complains about bugs in the Android app?
Why your personal is so slow when it comes to correct errors in the official courses? (you have pretty big staff)
Why are you ignoring your users requests about actually important and viable features?
That was my cry from the heart, thanks for your time.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Memrise is the app I use the most to study and I feel like hours of my time is being wasted and they could care less. I would rather have them make a whole other app that would allow me to create my courses and find community decks if they were so focused on separating community decks from the main Memrise app.
I have tested a lot of language apps and websites in the last days in purpose to find a substitute for Memrise. In my opinion most of them are in B league in comparison to Memrise. Maybe my bar is set too high, but who to blame?
What requirements are:
user friendly interface
Android app
capability to create customised language courses and
more or less advanced user created courses available (in this experiment I was looking into Spanish courses)
payments is not a big deal if paid version worth it
Though one very good app was found (Lingvist), but it’s not exactly the match to what I was looking for. It has pretty design and built-in grammar, but it’s not cheap and without user created courses.
I guess there might be good apps/websites for specific languages like Japanese, Korean, etc, but obviuosly they are not for everyone.
The bottom line is (if someone from Memrise reading this) - it’s a deadlock situation and more time is needed to find an alternative.
One option is to lobby the Memrise competitors with a request to provide custom or group-created courses and as a bonus the Memrise content creators will migrate over.
I wish, Memrise would be at least so fair to let us finish our courses. How about letting remain in the app the community courses that are already started and only block beginning new courses? I’m feeling so very uneasy about decks and there being no app for it…I learn hundreds of words every day and spend hours with different courses. If decks should not work properly, it spoils me all the work I have done till now, because there are several courses with 5000+ words, where I am only half through by now. I am trying to download them on Anki, but it lasts ages to download such large portions…and I really hate overcomplicated and boring Anki! I agree that there should be at least a year till the launch of decks, so that people have the chance to finish their courses!
I have already made the decision to finish the courses I am on now and move on to a different platform. I have already found a much better alternative for my Chinese learning, I just don’t want to throw away all the time I spent working on the other courses by not completing them.
For anyone learning Chinese I highly suggest you check out Domino Chinese. You will learn so much more Hanzi on that course then you ever will here.
Also Memrise has been making me angry not only for this reason but because I found several problems in the official course. When I posted about this problems on the official Chinese forum, I was never addressed. Instead all of my questions were skipped over and everyone else was answered. This has happened more than once. It just goes to show Memrise doesn’t care about teaching Chinese correctly so I will take my business elsewhere