maybe the cause of the low usage of Mems nowadays is, that the individually selected ones, when given a wrong answer, don’t automatically show up with the corrected answers anymore… Before I used to learn a lot with Mems, now they are only half as good due to the problem mentioned above;
Yet I think, that Mems are an extremely helpful tool to make connections with the vocabulary and remember even very difficult ones. The possibility to create ones own Mems encouraged me to think about difficult vocabulary and come up with good mnemonics.
Maybe before eradicating this essential and also characteristic part of Memrise, you could first try to adjust it a little bit to the better which it used to be.
It would really be a great loss for this wonderful Memrise experience, please reconsider your decision.
in the soaring rage - sometimes paired with rather very arrogant remarks - two noteworthy replies went under , those of @andy_kuma respectively @qncn. Clear summaries of the whole situation…
It was very clear a long time ago that mems are doomed … The incremental loss of lots of tiny but very usefull features related to customisation (UI, typing-no typing, etc) and the looming disappearance of user content are pressing issues for quite a number of users… Could we have longer the standard UI, and not have this beta shoved down our throats, please?
And the last thing I wanna talk about is the logic that Ben using, I believe it is a straw man.
While you want to introduce something new, it doesn’t equal you need to eliminate the old one. I strongly belive they can be exist at the same time as the beta stage is. I never take the point why the new system must replace the old one?! You can simply launch the Beta as Memrise 2.0 and keep the legacy alive, right?
I prefer Memrise against Anki is because the live community and the user-created mems. It is much more effeicent to learn a language with material and experience developed by the others. And that‘s why I paid for the subscription.
Last but not the least, I understanding what Ben need is a cash cow for the development teams, but Memrise is a user-based community. Deleting the community created content, especially for years of works and volunteeary contribution by the USERS, is far beyond what you should be.
If keeping the Mems is a problem in cost. You can increase the subscription price, launch a crowd-funding / public funding campaign, or transfer the library to a open source community. But not simply deleting those great materials created by the ppls quietly!!!
Let’s be practical. I think we should come up with a way to effectively archive mems on a public assessible platform, just in case of the unfortunate event of their permanent removal.
I can’t code. It’d be great if someone could help.
Ben, I view you as one of the original founders with an amazing vision (and I’ve had many sessions with you and your original staff) and was encouraged to create and administer Community-created courses.
As has already been said, is this really your intention??
What is the time-frame?
When will that be announced in a new separate thread?
This thread is about the loss of Mems - which is bad enough - but the possible removal of some 90% of your courses that is what so many people appreciate, is terrible news.
We have spent hundreds of hours on improving courses that have attracted users and have supported them on various generations of Forums solving problems and supporting your product (for free).
I remember the discussions and phone calls about Decks for Community-created courses, but then you listened to us and included them in your main system.
Can you not at least move all our courses to a Decks version 2 (together with all the Mems), please?
PS
My browny banner says
All your courses will still be there for you to keep learning.
Will they? I thought you implied you would be removing our courses?
(PPS they may going to a new system?)
I like the new features. The only thing I really miss are the red and green highlights of my errors when I get an answer wrong. It took me three tries to find my mistakes. I also use FluentU and they use the same system you have on this new version. Your old system of highlighting the error in red and the correct version in green is one of the things I preferred on Memrise.
OK - I switched to the new learning experience and have the following “flash” impressions -
I like the way I can see whether I’ve met my daily minimum on courses I’ve already finished. I review these each day to keep these items “under my fingers.”
I don’t like how large the graphs are on the page. Please include a way to make them smaller (or larger if someone needs them larger).
It is going to take some getting used to, but overall I have a positive impression. Yes, I’m one of those who never used the mems (at all). I use Memrise as daily flash cards to learn new vocabulary and keep reviewing lessons I’ve already completed. PLEASE don’t change this.
I would be really annoyed if it really is. That’s the only reason I’m using Memrise over other options. I already downloaded my courses… if this change really comes, together with removing the option of switching off the audio during repeating, I’m out. I’m gonna learn my Memrise courses… in Anki.
And it would be so easy to just keep those options… I really don’t get it. Shouldn’t an update have more options instead of less?
I tried the Beta, assuming this will be the new design. Basically you removed everything I joined Memrise for. And I don’t even use Mems…
The biggest advantage for me was the typing tests. No matter how long a sentence is or how difficult, when I have to repeat it, I have to type it. It takes more tries, but in the end I know what I learned. In the Beta I haven’t come across typing long sentences… instead I have to select the words in the right order. That’s like not repeating at all. I don’t know which languages you learned and used for Beta… but the languages I learn require the right suffixes. Which are already included in the words to select. Nothing to learn there. This is basically becoming Duolingo, only that Duolingo still has the option to type everything. And there’s a reason I left Duolingo…
I get that this could attract new or other people, who like this kind of learning more. Guess you’re trying to get some of the Duolingo customers? But then at least keep the option to type everything. Especially on PC it’s really annoying to have to move your hands away from the keyboard for a few tasks… and for what when you don’t even learn more with it?
Where is the “audio off” option?
Where’s the option to disable audio tasks for a limited time?
Where’s my timer? I’m only using custom courses (which are incredibly good btw), so don’t tell me official courses have it. Also… I read something about seconds? The 2 minutes you had to type long sentences were perfectly fine. It’s pressure but still doable. Why not keep this?
The design definitely isn’t optimised for normal laptop/pc user. Nice that it looks nice on tablet… but you had that in the app already. Why change the experience to huge letters for people who sit in front of a big screen? With a keyboard. And then force them to switch between mouse and keyboard the whole time. When typing would be the most natural thing for a language. You type that in real life too, so when did you practise orthography then? Right, with this Beta not at all.
The limit for words to repeat is now 100 instead of 1000? I have 2600 currently, until now it showed “999+” now it shows “99+”… that’s rather a minor issue, but it already annoyed me with the “999+”… so why make it even smaller?
You have such a great platform here that doesn’t make the mistakes others made. There’s a reason people prefer this over Duolingo. So why ruin it? Add “only typing” as a settings option, add a timer that depends on characters, add an “audio off” option on every page so you can just turn it off and back on again if you don’t need it at the moment but might for the next word or just keep the old version as an option.
This doesn’t seem too hard… but why make a new version compulsory when it has all these flaws?
Yes! And please bring the pause button back. It’s useful for those interruptions when, for example, the phone rings or someone comes to the door mid-flow.
The Beta keeps asking to set a goal for completed courses
The new interface renders courses with multiple columns useless for answering audio questions.
As I already said in October:
Which answer was requested used to be clear from the column label, but in the beta there is no column label in the question.
For example:
Good point. At the moment there are Memrise courses for multiple source languages, not just English - though English does have the most choice. But you are right that there are lots of less learned language pairs that are currently poorly served. In the early days of Memrise we did have central “wikis” for each language, which allowed us to curate central dictionaries of high quality for many more language pairs than we currently do. This is the model that we are going back to. This will make it easier for us to support courses in more language pairs. It is our intention to move over as any language pairs from the current user made courses as is of high enough quality.
So I see the problem you are pointing to, and believe that the approach we are taking will give a solution to it.
I’d be happy to talk more over a call to go into details.
There is no set time frame for closing non language courses. It will not happen fast. When we have got the ability for users to create language courses in the main Memrise product, and have moved over the user made courses to that system, we will be left with the non language courses on the legacy system. We have no plan to shut that down as this moment. But our plans are all focused on serving the language learners ever more effectively, in the learning of vocab and learning to use that vocab in live situations. The non language courses are not part of that vision.
However no decision has been taken to close them down. What I am sharing here is our intention and where we will be focused. We can of course continue to discuss the best way to manage the non language courses that are left. I’d be happy to find a good solution - and we have plenty of time to work this through.
Again, I’d love to have a call to talk about this and go into more detail.
I agree on the need for this. This is a feature that we would like to add to the new platform, separate to the re-introduction of mems.
We are not going to delete them from the database, and yes we’ll work a way to bring them back as soon as possible. I can’t give a timeline on that though, which is why this post initially said that we would just be removing them; the support team didn’t want to promise something that had an unknown timeline. I too cannot promise it nor give a timeline. But I can promise we won’t delete them and that I will be pushing hard to get them reintroduced as soon as we can.
We have 12 pedagogic principles that guide the language teaching approach that we take. These come out of the resaerch I noted above (Krashen etc) and which was my impetus to found the company. These are:
Learn - Words & phrases fast. This requires:
Teaching relevant language that matches your needs
Helping you to Encode memories richly
Testing in the right way at the right time, adapting to your needs
Strengthening memories for active recall in response to a variety of prompts - not just translations
Immerse - Learning to understand humans. This requires:
Hearing the language you want to learn in many different contexts, said by many different people
Hearing language you know combined with language you don’t
Hearing language with the gestures and actions that are part of understanding
Time
Communicate - Learning to be understood by other humans. This requires:
Overcoming your fear of being judged by other humans
Practice choosing and expressing your own thoughts in the language
Getting instant feedback on whether your meaning was understood
Iterating quickly and keeping on trying
You’ll note that the second one, “Helping you to Encode memories richly” is answered perfectly by mems. I know of no better way to deliver on that principle. These 12 principles are not going to change. The product team will be using these are they design solutions to the problems language learners have. That is why I am confident that we will be brining mems back soon; I recognise that not being able to give you a hard date or a hard promise will be annoying, but I hope this helps to give you some comfort that the intention is sincere.
Sorry, I’m sure I’ve missed dozens of important points here. I’ll try to get to replying earlier in the evening tomorrow. Thanks for taking the time to write, I know many of you are angry and I do appreciate your engaging in this conversation.
The offer remains open for a video call in the next few days to talk through our medium term plans and the reasoning behind them - please do post saying if you’d like to attend.
I just finished writing a script for downloading mems from the site in bulk. It can gather all the mems made by a specified user. Here is a link to a result of a test run
(The table contains the text of a mem, front and back fields of a card it is used in, and corresponding names of the image files, which are stored separately in the folders)
I am willing to lend a hand to anybody needing help with saving their personal mems or assist with making a community archive. All I need is the names of mem’s creators to save.
Unfortunately, mems cannot be directly linked to the courses they were created for, but I hope this still will be useful in some way. Just as a database to browse in search of ideas or, perhaps, as a basis for a script to make Anki cards.
Absolutely. Plus, mems are much harder to find and use on mobile phones than the pc version; so as the majority of learners are using the mobile version, it would make perfect sense that the mems aren’t being used as much. Their statistics are misleading them, and they’re inferring wrongly from the numbers without understanding the real cause and meaning for them. What they should be doing is improving Mem access for mobile phone users, so the learners will be more inclined to use that beneficial tool. Then Memrise would become even more popular, as learners who go there from any device would be more effectual learners of those things they desire. The Mems also provide a great community-building means of engaging with other learners in creative ways.
Would you please address the typing-only issue? One of the things I love about this site compared to Duolingo is that I’m not forced to mouse-click a bunch of stuff like a bird pecking at seed. Unless you are on a cell phone, it is painfully tedious and time-consuming, not to mention far less challenging and fruitful for effort spent. (On the cell phone, actually it’s the typing that’s tedious. )
Compared to the new Memrise experience, I’m not kidding when I say I use my keyboard more reviewing on Duolingo than on here. At least there, once you pass the first couple of “levels” of each module or whatever they call them, it transitions to type-only for review sessions. Not case-sensitive type-only, but type-only all the same, which is GREAT for if you are on a desktop computer. Please, it can’t be that hard to return this feature before forcing everyone over to Beta. PLEASE.
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