When will the immersion mode be available on courses other than English ones?
I know that Membus was already in France but the immersion mode isn’t available. (I have checked only few first items.)
Is there a set date? If no, will we be notified?
Please excuse my ignorance, if those informations were published.
Additionally…
I think they should confirm if this is a feature that is generally available, or if it is tied to specific courses. Is it just something that a course creator enables or do they have do extra work to bridge to the new material?
At the moment, I am assuming that the new 7 part courses are the ones that will support this new feature. Certainly they now cover the 10 languages that are part of the Membus tour. It would be nice to have Memrise confirm this though. [I had started the old A1 courses thinking that they would support the new mode]
https://blog.memrise.com/2016/06/17/language-learning-for-the-rest-of-us/
there stays “in fact there’s a bunch of evidence that knowing grammar rules is
absolutely no help at all in getting you to speak a new language. You
get good at speaking by learning ‘chunks’ of the language – more than
just single words – and by being exposed to enough natural language to
spot the patterns in how to put those chunks together.”
While I agree with the utility of learning syntagms, I dare to disagree with grammar not helping… this approach, that an adult can learn a language in the same manner a 2 years old child does it, is nonsensical. The brain of a baby is completely different from the brain of a 12 years old, not to say a 40 years old. Without grammar I would not be able to utter a short sentence in Chinese - you don’ expect one to learn all possible correct combinations with memrise, or?
(as about syntagms, interests of various learners diverge … a course telling how to order beer is of no interest for me)
Sorry, how does this relate to Immersion Mode (Membus video dictionary)?
sorry, how does your post relate to the immersion mode? discussion end
@Rodyzi, I have just read this:
the first videos from the Membus trip will roll out on French courses tomorrow
Source: https://blog.memrise.com/2016/06/17/language-learning-for-the-rest-of-us/ (staff comment on blog)
I haven’t tried the new courses yet… I have been waiting for everything to settle down a bit. I can’t really give an opinion myself until then.
They have given some of their reasoning for their content here:
https://blog.memrise.com/2016/06/17/language-learning-for-the-rest-of-us/
This provides links to:
The French decks seem to have videos now - the immersion mode is now highlighted when I choose a mode - but I haven’t seen any of them.
I had a quick go on the French 1 course. You play a quick video of someone saying a word (or phrase) and then you choose that word (or phrase) from a list of words. Then they show you the English translation. So they are using the videos to introduce new vocabulary, which I wasn’t expecting.
Also, it looks like the videos are available for everyone and it is just the Immersion Mode that is Pro only. This makes sense as I had wondered if there were any Kickstarter contributors who didn’t have a Pro subscription. That might have caused some complaints if the content was pay walled.
I haven’t tried Immersion Mode yet. I assume you have to build up a bit of vocabulary before it is worth it. I also want to check if the videos and Immersion Mode are available offline.
The app description in the Apple App Store mentions that Spanish also has video available. I just started the Spanish 1 course just now and can confirm this!
Also the Immersion Mode, so far, just seems like the Listening Skills feature but with video instead of just audio.
A quick info for those who will run into the same problem:
Disabled audio tests also disable the videos.
This is the way videos were in beta too. On paper, videos are great because they can give you more context than audio or symbolic representation. Unfortunately, only a few of the videos had proper context, and this was in England. I doubt the situation has improved in the Membus tour. This is understandable; Memrise can’t wait for all the different situations in their decks to appear.
Videos can still offer eye candy though, if the video quality is good. I have to admit I’m easily baited by that and like the atmosphere it creates. Hopefully the videos have improved in quality and don’t appear to be from Youtube ten years ago.
I have audio testing turned off because of hearing difficulties, but I am still getting these videos. I don’t want to completely turn off audio because when I am home where I can turn up the volume all the way it helps reinforce what I am learning, but as a method of testing it’s not going to work for me.
Do I just have my settings wrong, or is my only option to turn off all audio?
You can change the settings at your leisure, so just use whatever works for you at a certain moment.
You can actually make video courses yourself. The only thing you need is a userscript that lets you put an iframe in the testing page (there is already a userscript that lets you do that in the reviewing screen, and @cooljingle has managed to put content in the testing screen), and a place to host your video clips.
I’ve been playing around with this:
And it is ridiculously easy to use and work with. I was generating test files 2 minutes after installation, generating over a 1000 video and audio clips in just over 10 minutes.
But perhaps an audio course offers most of the benefits without the drawbacks (having to host the files somewhere else, probably longer loading times). But now that I think of it, it will be easier to host the audio or video files somewhere else. Anything is better than having to submit yourself to the degradation that is the current course file upload.