I’ve been working on and off on Japanese 1 for the past year or so (maybe more). I’m about at the end of Japanese 1 when I discovered there’s a different Japanese 1 course that I don’t think was there before! Both courses are by Memrise, but in one I’m 219 of 248 words, and the other I’m 0/405. I understand if this is an evolution of the original course, but is there a way to transition from one to the other so I don’t have to start from scratch on the new one?
Cheers
It’s a little frustrating, but as far as I’m aware there’s no way to automatically ‘learn’ words on a new course when you’ve already them learned elsewhere. For example, I have copies of the old German 1/2 and the new German 1/2, in which I had to go through all the words I knew already as well as new, unfamiliar words. It would be great if there were a feature that made this unnecessary.
You could just ignore words you already know? Or… I think there may be a userscript floating about that checks for duplicate words through your courses and does that for you. I’m not sure – vaguely recall hearing it mentioned somewhere once but don’t use such a script myself, so I’ve never gone looking for it.
So… just suck it up or use the ignore function to eliminate duplicates?
Yeah, I know – not a great solution. Sorry I can’t be of more help, but this is a global problem between the old and new versions of official Memrise courses. Someone other than me might know better and chip in (fingers crossed). I also noticed this issue when I started the new German 1/2 and just thought, well, if nothing else, learning important words twice will at least makes sure they stick. Every cloud and all that… So that’s what I did – went through them twice.
ps: In case you didn’t know, I’ve seen there’s also a Japanese 0 now, too.
Thanks. It’s not a big deal, really, but it would be nice if there was a way to test/quiz to assess level to skip things a bit.
Also, I’m happy with the new content, seems like a decent improvement over the older material.
And yes, I did see the Japanese level 0! The hiragana I already know, but there was vocab in there that was not in the old J1 course, so I’m enjoying that too!
Thanks for responding!
Cheers
Hello @betocastelo. I was writing an answer for you using a translator (because I do not speak English very well), and it looks like you already received your answer before I could finish my text. But since I already did the text, I’ll put it down. Good luck 
At the moment, I believe there are 6 official "Japanese 1" courses for English speakers. There are 3 for British English speakers and 3 for American English speakers.
The first version had people face, and the second and third versions share the same landscape picture. In Japanese 1 version1, it is a picture of a Japanese girl, and in version 2 and 3, it is a picture of sakura.
In your case, I believe you are doing version 1 and 3, for American English speakers.
In short, Japanese 1:
Japanese 1 for US English speakers:
Japanese for UK English speakers:
If we look at all the official Japanese courses, there are 7. But only the Japanese 1 and 2 were changed, the Japanese 3-7 was not changed. In the case of the Japanese language, the course “Japanese 0” was added. If you search for Japanese courses on the course page, only recent courses can be viewed. Older ones can only be added via a link (unless you’ve already added it).
To learn more about version 3, please read the topic of Rob_Paterson (of the Memrise team):
Thank you for taking the time, @Milamy! I appreciate the links! That’s more versions than I expected. Although, I’m guessing the UK/US versions are very similar, judging by the number of words in each.
Cheers
Typically UK/US versions will teach the same word in the other language, but will need different English words to explain. For example, American words like “underwear” and “sweater” will have different English words in the UK version, but the same Japanese word.
Actually there was such a feature before 2016, known as “auto-ignore”, until @MemriseSupport decided that it was a good idea to get rid of it. This is what one of the members of the Memrise team said to justify the decision back then:
There were lots of problems with that feature. It didn’t work properly especially for languages and courses with multiple alphabets such as Chinese/Pinyin, Japanese(Kana, Kanji, Hiragana)/Romaji. Very few people actually used this feature, partly because it isn’t available in the Apps but mainly because the majority of people don’t need such feature. Therefore we can’t justify investing our very scarce resources into something that would only benefit a few people and not necessarily improve the overall quality of our platform.
I think it’s time for Memrise to reintroduce an improved version of the feature.