Would love to see African and Native American languages added as well. Maybe Swahili and Navajo, since they are the most widely spoken for each?
Hi @J0C13,
African and Native American language courses are available but, because they are “community-created” courses, you need to commence them on the website version and they will then sync across to your app, where you should be able to continue them.
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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!
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You make some really good points, @Thawrea.
My quibble with the official courses is that they are so generic - as far as I can tell, at least, because I have only looked at ones which use the same alphabet that English does - and don’t appear to take cultural differences into account.
I really don’t know for sure, but I ask myself whether phrases like, “hi guys” (again, I don’t know for sure that this is in the memrise courses, but that is the general tone of them) is appropriate for every language that the memrise team have tackled. I know that Korean is very strict with using different forms of address depending on age hierarchies, for example, and wonder with this generic “one-size-fits-all” format can take things like that into account.
The content I have seen so far seems to reflect a casual transantlantic lifestyle, led by 20- and 30-somethings, which is fair enough, seeing as most heavy smartphone users are that age, but I wonder if it puts off some other age groups, who don’t want to sound ridiculous, using casual slang that they don’t feel comfortable with.
Imposing this way of talking onto all languages seems to be a mild form of cultural imperialism, now that I think about it, along the lines of, “my way of communicating is good enough for everyone, I am not going to make any allowances for differences, because I couldn’t really care less about them.”
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Excellent points!
A lot of stuff like this (such as what is appropriate), is hard to communicate in this form. It would be perfectly ok, if Memrise was opnely telling people to get a real coursebook too, but it is not. I can judge only some of the courses, but I’ve seen well argumented complaints about the Japanese one, so I really guess Memrise is struggling with the overal quality of this product.
I am a 20something old european who travels a lot, so theoretically the main target audience, and I still don’t like the course, so I suppose the people more different from me might be even more discouraged, true. I find it stupid (but Memrise isn’t the only company doing this) to limit language learning to just some phrases for tourists. It could discourage some age groups, or also people who cannot travel for various reasons (health,family, money), or newbies who really want to learn the language but fall for the trap.
Really, the page about premium says “learn to speak like a local”, while the products makes you parrot some touristy phrases. The usermade courses are simply so much better, giving you the vocabulary from a coursebook, from a frequency list based on media, from a book. I really don’t understand, why is Memrise pushing just these stupid courses as their main product, instead of cherishing the platform proven to serve the learners of all kinds, learning for any purpose. Even the removal of any sign of the usermade courses from the app, where a newbie might be likely to encounter them, was a huge mistake. And the Memrise team later used “the app users don’t use the usermade courses anyway” argument. 
Why didn’t you list Russian 1&2 in English? You’ve updated them.
…I was trying to study in old versions too but it was impossible to reach them via this article, it took time to find a way. So please for others, list them and list old Russian courses too.
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And here are old Russian 1&2 courses