Rollout of the new dashboard and learning sessions experiences to all our customers

[grasweg3]

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…

1. 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?

2. Where is the “audio off” option?

3. Where’s the option to disable audio tasks for a limited time?

4. 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?

5. 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.

6. 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?

[alanh]

@grasweg3

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?

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.

[duaal]

In addition:

• 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:

Should I respond with the composer or the title of this musical piece?

[BenWhately]

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.

[BenWhately]

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.

[BenWhately]

@PollyWalnuts

At the very least, find an easier way for people to grab the memes they need, or CREATE A DANG NOTES FIELD ON WORDS. So many times, I have had a meaning clarified to me (for example, gathering as in collecting vs. gathering as in assuming/coming to understand) via Mems. At least add a way for us to make notes to ourselves if we can’t access the community content anymore. That said, I can’t even imagine how angry someone trying to learn Arabic or Japanese or Mandarin must be having all their Mems taken away. What a nightmare.

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.

@johnastsang

If that is the case, OK. Just don’t delete the mems we currently have from your database and promise to bring them back as soon as possible.

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:

1. Teaching relevant language that matches your needs
2. Helping you to Encode memories richly
3. Testing in the right way at the right time, adapting to your needs
4. Strengthening memories for active recall in response to a variety of prompts - not just translations

Immerse - Learning to understand humans. This requires:

1. Hearing the language you want to learn in many different contexts, said by many different people
2. Hearing language you know combined with language you don’t
3. Hearing language with the gestures and actions that are part of understanding
4. Time

Communicate - Learning to be understood by other humans. This requires:

1. Overcoming your fear of being judged by other humans
2. Practice choosing and expressing your own thoughts in the language
3. Getting instant feedback on whether your meaning was understood
4. 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.

[Hombre_sin_nombre]

It took two days to go from

@MemriseSupport

mems will be retired completely

to

@BenWhately

we’ll work a way to bring them back as soon as possible

What’s wrong with Memrise that you can be so easily swayed?

[Eltaurus]

@johnastsang

I can’t code. It’d be great if someone could help.

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.

[BrandonRayHughes]

@allgoodnamesaretaken

exactly encouraged to pay money for a subscription either when promises are broken constantly and you don’t know what you will get for the money you pay today

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.

[PollyWalnuts (Blippityblop)]

Shhh, nooooo, we want that!

[PollyWalnuts (Blippityblop)]

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.

[Michael-G]

Please return the old, more forgiving, algorithm of matching typed text input. In the mandarin course, the input was accepted without any spaces. In the new version, it now requires spaces between some syllables (not always, looks difficult to guess where). In languages with longer words, typing spaces is not such a burden, but in language, where average “word” is two letters long, is typing spaces very cumbersome (and not really needed as nearly any sentence can be parsed correctly anyway). Even worse is that, when using chinese IME, the space key has special control meaning and it is extremely bad to get habit of pressing space after a syllable written (the IME needs bigger context to be able to choose the right chinese characters for inherently ambiguous pinyin text).

[homeworkaholic]

I just activate my account here to say that I am very very disappointed to your decisions to force roll out the beta and remove the mem feature.

The beta is so bad that I opt-out it at least several months ago.

As for the mem feature, while I seldom use it, I can see this is a valuable way to memorise something that is too hard to remember. It can provide more contexts about a flashcard if the card itself lacks some infotmation. As what I learn is most of time easy to remember (the flashcard has abundant information), the mem seems unnecessary. But clearly, this feature is useful in many situations, so I strongly oppose your decision to remove it.

[Eltaurus]

The same goes for Japanese. In some courses it is particularly hard to predict, where you are expected to put spaces. There don’t seem to be any consistent rules at all. And if you misplace even one space, the card is considered to be failed.

[rx11392]

Honestly, this is ridiculous.
I am using Memrise since around 2015 and mems were always super helpful. Even if I am not creating them by myself, mems created by other users I use almost every time I learn a new word/character/term/phrase. Mems especially useful when I need example sentences, associations, deeper explanations, depictions or just jokes that help to remember.
You can go with the new option, i.e. “more rich experience”, for courses provided by your website, but removing mems from the courses created by users themselves seems like nonsense. Do you have any idea about how much time and effort people have put in creating it? It’s just like a spit in the face for all of them… actually, it is even worse.
I didn’t think that I’ll regret paying for subscription. I feel really angry about this decision of yours. I just can’t get my head around the fact that you’re going to do it. This is just so ridiculous.

[polyglot3]

@BenWhately
I’ve never been active on the forum but I wanted to come here and second all that’s been said above. I’m a pretty heavy, paid user as you can see from my profile (26k words, 44m points). @Sergio.NES’s post nails 100% my thoughts and I only have a couple more points to add:

• Memrise for me is an excellent tool for flashcards. I do not want nor need additional language lessons, immersive experiences, etc.
• I exclusively use Memrise for classic review with full typing only. As this feature is not currently possible with Beta, then I have no reason to use Memrise and will be going elsewhere.
• I use Memrise entirely on desktop as it is too difficult to type on mobile. I would hate to see more a mobile-optimized interface that comes at the expense of the desktop experience.

tl;dr I’m pissed, annoyed, and frustrated

@Sergio.NES

Maybe you don’t know what many people (like me) use Memrise for. Or maybe I’m in the minority, though judging from the birdsong and geography courses that people do (I don’t), this minority is probably pretty active, not to mention more likely to pay than an average kid boasting about a three-day streak on Duolingo. You want to teach us languages in the best way you can think of. This is absolutely not what I want from Memrise.

There are tons of language apps out there. Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Glossika, etc., are huge and by sheer size difficult to compete with regardless of how brilliant your original content. There’s also a huge selection of apps and learning programs for specific languages users can choose from. For Chinese, I’ve done Duolingo, HSK Standard books, the Heisig books for Hanzi, and half a dozen of different apps, big and small. But here’s the point: Every single one of those courses I combined with Memrise for learning the relevant words.

My approach that I keep recommending right and left has been, learn the language on any app you like, but learn the words for that app on Memrise. (Check out my post on how to study Chinese with Duolingo; I talk about Memrise about as much as about Duolingo.) Whatever the language app, it’s never very good for learning the vocabulary, because its goals are different. Memrise works as a great flash-card app, for two reasons. First, there are user-generated courses for almost every occasion. I’ve learned a bunch of HSK word lists created by one BenWhately, but I’ve also used the lists for HSK Standard books and the Heisig books, and word lists for the different Duolingo courses I’ve been doing (struggling when there wasn’t a good list on Memrise), and created my own private lists for the apps and missing words that I needed. There’s absolutely no way sourcing the words from any course you might design the way you’re planning to would match my needs.

Second, the mems. For courses with tons of user-generated mems, there are often great ones there, and there would have been many more had you guys not been so unfriendly to them. Some mems help bind the parts together and some provide background information, and some I make for myself because I know what helps me learn best. No matter how smart you are in creating generic mems, different people need different things to learn, and there’s no way you can make them better than what the collective wisdom can do given proper tools. The Heisig books suggest stories to bind character components together, and there’s a free site that collects user-generated stories to choose from, which work like text-only mems. But I’ve learned the Heisig lists on Memrise because I learn better with images instead of stories. And by the way, I go through the list first with a click-only course, then with a typing course, and then with a typing-in-Chinese course. (Goodbye typing, hello clicking galore!)

In short, I don’t think you can (or should want to) compete with language-learning platforms by offering presumably superior content; the field is too crowded already and different people have different needs. But Memrise has been my tool of choice for learning the words from other courses - every single one of them. Outcompeting Anki and Quizlet isn’t nearly as tough, particularly given your ideas about rich content for every work drawn from a central database. What I don’t like is creating the word lists based on your course content. How would you ever hope to replace the way I learn with your own (no doubt brilliant) language study tool?

People who want to study a language have a lot of choices, and most of those people don’t stay learning for very long. I would suggest targeting a more mature audience with a superior flash-card app, so that instead of saying “combine this with Anki” people would recommend “definitely combine this with Memrise”. I know this doesn’t look as flashy or ambitious, but there’s a real need for a product like that, and my guess is I’m not alone in that I’ve been using Memrise to fill this need. Fix the problems with what you have. If after you’ve done that you still have resources, implement your ideas (which do sound promising) about how to make the flashcards better. Don’t replace what make Memrise unique with something for which the demand is questionable.

[rx11392]

You know, I have always preferred Memrise to any other apps, like Quizlet, Anki. I have always though that all the bugs you have, all the missing features (like automatic vocalization for words added by users), I have justified all that by thinking “no other apps/websites have mems, this is such a cool feature”. I have also recommended it to all of my friends, now I am regretting doing so.
That said, I don’t like new design at all.
You’re just leaving me with no choice, but to move to some other app.

[BerkeleySteve]

I also use mems. Hope you reconsider.

[Geil]

guys stop, it is pretty obvious they are doing the ‘new coke’ strategy. You are going to hate this new memrise so much, that they are going to create a bunch of nostalgic demand for old memrise. It’s 4D chess.

on a more serious note, they just want to dumb down the website. Typing is too hard for people they are marketing the new memrise for.

[ThaiThanh7960]

Please dont remove the feature, without it I could not find a single reason to use memrise anymore.