First of all, thanks for making Decks separate. It was a wonderful idea! If you don’t let it die of neglect and make the promised app, it will keep being a very good tool, with potential to bring new learners who might love it for years, just like myself. The main advantage of the Decks is not having these courses cluttering the course list there.
I was curious about the new courses, as I really disliked the old ones. The problem was not the low level, we’ve got the user courses for more advanced learners. The problem were lots of amateurish “details” in the course organisation, presentation, and also the content.
I get it, the videos are nice and so on, the audio is probably valuable. But there are numerous problems and I definitely wouldn’t recommend the course to anyone (Official Memrise seems to be basically a combination of a much worse Duolingo and a Youtube channel). Not any of my real life relatives or friends, not to anyone I am teaching, nor in any online community I am part of. I curiously looked at French 1, as I have several new learners around me and am C2 (certified) myself. I’ve learnt a few languages, so I think I can tell a good tool from a relatively good or a bad one. And this is a disappointment. I suppose Memrise’s main target public are very inexperienced learners, and you don’t actually suppose they’ll get far.
Back when you announced paid Memrise and official courses years ago, I was so looking forward to improvement and profesionalisation of some of the best user made ones. Or even better: paid official wordlists from popular textbooks. But nope. Instead, there is this. It is too bad, because just the popularity of such courses among the usermade ones shows, that there would be market for high quality content and we would be willing to pay for it, so that we don’t have to make everything ourselves and then risk having it deleted as supposed copyright infringement. But no.
What are some of the problems:
1.Memorisation of words as a supplement to something else is awesome. Memorisation of a phrasebook is not. Especially not when you don’t specify anywhere, that this is not a full value course. I’ve met some disappointed newbie learners online, who were thinking they were the problem. Memorisation of sentences without any explanation or indication that the learner should seek it elsewhere, that is the problem. Let alone the problem with translation exercises and various options, the focus on vocabulary would be really less complicated than this.
2.From a paid course made by professionals, I’d expect perfection and consistency in how is the content (whatever you choose it to be) delivered. Such as the formal and informal you. In level 3, you indicate (formal) and (informal) for some of the sentences. But not others. “Laisse-moi tranquille” doesn’t have it, the course is inconsistent. The questions have this note, the imperatives don’t.
4.Or the grammar. Making a question the way you show by “vous pouvez répéter?” and “vous parlez anglais?” is rather informal and beginners are usually being taught the correct ways to form a question first and for good reasons. It is even more confusing, as one of the sentences has the note “(formal)” because of the vous, while the construction is informal. There are learners, who use Memrise while also going to classes. They are risking to learn something most teachers will consider a mistake. Things like this make me wonder, whether your linguists actually have any experience with learning or teaching foreign languages.
5.“c’est complet” from level 11 shows very clearly what is the problem of any digital tool based on translation of whole sentences. “It’s full” can be translated in more than one way, which will be obvious as soon as the learner revises words from the whole course, not just this one lesson. And when they learn some more vocabulary, here or anywhere else. Will Memrise accept the synonymes? There is no context for the sentence once you forget it was originally introduced in level 11-restaurant. Basically, it looks like your course is meant just for people, who will memorise only this and parrot it, not learn from any other resource, and definitely won’t get far.
6.The description of the course is extremely lazy. An informed learner (which in Europe means at least everyone who has gone to school in the last decade or so) is interested in the CEFR. The scale has been spreading outside of Europe too. Even Duolingo is beginning to use it. And when it comes to spending time and money on a course, it is only logical to be interested in the expected results. A newbie learner won’t find the extremely important piece of information “don’t forget to also get a coursebook and/or grammarbook, or you’ll just parrot some phrases and probably not correctly”. Not even the Premium info page doesn’t give any relevant information actually, it just says there are videos, makes a false promise of making people speak like natives, and promises over 200 courses (which are technically probably there, just most of them are English from various languages, aren’t they?)
Really, it is so sad that a company that used to be the synonyme of intelligent language learning for learners at all levels chooses this as the main product. Long live the Decks!
