This is good to hear, but, with all due respect, I think you need to be more careful with your words. In your previous reply, you just mentioned that non-language courses “will not fit in the new system,” which seems to imply that they will be retired sooner or later. You can’t imagine how frustrating or even scaring this is to hear for people who have been using non-language courses heavily:
While I do appreciate your ambition to develop Memrise as a more comprehensive learning-learning platform and I do understand why non-language courses may not fit in the new system, you shouldn’t leave us the impression that non-language courses are going to be simply abandoned (your earlier reply did give me such an impression). It’s okay that their development is not part of the site’s plan, but I think it’s not too much to say that Memrise has the responsibility to preserve them, as a respect to their creators and users. The same goes for the mems. To quote myself:
Now this is comforting to hear. Despite all the unfavourable events, I’m glad that we have an admin team that is listening, responsive, and visionary. I’m looking forward to the future Memrise!
It’s incredible that you could actually say this and then fail to register that what you are doing here is taking away a system that people found does work for them, and deciding that this grand idea you have is better and will work for them and they should all stop doing what is working for them and do this new thing instead. Unfortunately I suppose this complete lack of self-awareness is quite characteristic of Memrise.
Ok, rather than just ragging on you for these rather stupid decisions, how about a suggestion? Why don’t you guys just leave the current Memrise as it is in a deprecated but still accessible state while you work on your MemWorld thing, instead of forcefully removing it while everyone waits what will likely be years for your new concept to come to fruition?
Ok, and what if I don’t WANT to have video content? Once again you are pushing this one system you guys have as though it’s the only thing that’ll ever work for anyone. Not everyone is you. Why can’t you understand that? Never mind how ridiculously inapplicable this entire concept is to various language learning circumstances. For example, how is a “rich test type that [goes] beyond word-definition pairs with accompanying video content” supposed to help me memorise a kanji and the radicals that make it up? Simple answer: it isn’t. It’s a completely inapplicable idea to what I want to learn, and what I have been using Memrise to learn.
Thank you very much for your kind assistance. Perhaps Memrise should consider updating their announcement by substituting their ridiculous “saving mems” instruction with your script (and adding the promise that mems will return).
But as Ben says all the UGC courses (except those that are useless) will be migrated to the visionary system. I believe that you could continue learning kanjis the way you’ve been doing. The “rich test type” should be an enhancement for learning things like phrases and words.
I’m going to be blunt and say that I may or may not leave the site depending on how I feel about the new Memrise after trying it for a bit. I’ll give most things a chance. However, based on what I’m seeing in the current beta, I’m already preparing to move to other sites and loading up on Anki decks just in case.
Not being able to move quickly to the next word by pressing ‘enter’ is a minor but additive problem. When I do over 300 words in a session, that extra second adds up to 5 minutes of my time, and I only have so much time for study.
Removing the ‘typing only’ option is probably the most likely change to make me leave. I don’t need multiple choice for words I know. It’s both slower and less effective at teaching from multiple angles.
In addition to above, forcing audio cue tests options ruins some Japanese courses. I do two quick runs of Hiragana and Katakana each session to warm up, and the beta gives me audio prompts for the characters that I then must type out the answer to in English. I do not learn the character さ better by being played the sound ‘sa’ then being asked to type out ‘sa’ in response. That’s nonsense. Either the prompt or the answer should be さ.
Quite frankly, the new layout seems slower somehow. I don’t know if it’s been obvious from my other points, but speed and convenience are a big reason why I use this site.
Finally, I checked to see how I could unsubscribe if necessary, and I can’t find the option. That’s something of a red flag. All I can see is that I’m PRO and how many years I have been. Not having that option easily accessible raises some serious concerns that I didn’t have before checking. (Edit - it appears I did a lifetime subscription and completely forgot about it. Whoops.)
Can you make an update in another thread with confirmation about what exactly you are going to move and remove and when with exact or approximate dates? Specifically, regarding mems, community courses in general, non-language and abandonded community courses. You’ll confuse everyone with your contradictory statements.
@BenWhately, I really fail to understand how why all this has/had to happen. I am certain you recall the Decks disaster, it took place less than 2 years ago, if I’m not mistaken. There is a ton of parallels to what we’re experiencing now. Back then, your staff promised to listen to users in the end, to not only inform users about upcoming changes but rather to be willing to discuss them with us beforehand, to be more present on the forums, to better listen to how people use Memrise, etc.
The possibility to seek the resp. engage in a dialog with users is an invaluable source of information for you, the way I see it, to companies who sell their products to a broad customer-base in general.
Many companies attempt (and fail) to motivate users/customers to provide feedback with prizes and the such - you get it for free here. And you can also count on probably a whole lot of users to provide 1:1 feedback. I myself went through more than a handful of occasions where I had video chats with your staff or even whole teams, and a whole bunch of private chats too. I would bet that there’s a good number of other people who did the same (or would be willing to do so now and in the future).
I never asked for anything in return. Instead I was very keen on being part of the process, about helping you guys to further improve the product, to contribute and, yes, also to attempt to steer you into directions that I personally/arrogantly thought would be best resp. would serve my very personal needs/requirements.
Why? Because I use Memrise every day, for at least 1 hour. And I haven’t missed a single day in over 4 years. This shit is important to me.
This dedication (or addiction) could also very well be the reason as to why so many people get so emotional. Particularly since what has been called a ~ “continuous degradation of the product” is something that has been going on for years now.
Sure, anytime! I’ll happily try to help, even though, frankly, I have (very sadly) come to ask myself as to whether it’s really worth the effort …
Does that mean, that Kanji courses will be deleted? And may I ask you to answer also this question: As Chinese learner you will certainly know the Heisig system to learn Hanzi or Kanji. But for this system mems are essential. I am certain that nearly 100 percent of Kanji learners in Memrise use mems, so how do you propose to learn Kanji without mems?
It’s very unlikely that kanji courses will be deleted. To summarize what Ben has said so far:
Language UGC courses will be migrated to the new system, except those that are not used at all. I guess he’s referring to those that have absolutely zero users (i.e. those that are used only by the creator himself who have left Memrise long ago). I hope @BenWhately will clarify this.
Non-language UGC courses will not fit in the new system, but this doesn’t mean they’ll be simply removed. They’ll remain in the old system (i.e. our current system) until a solution is reached by discussion. IMO they should absolutely be preserved in some way.
Yes, I also use Memrise to help learn how to spell words used on the Duolingo course, because the latter removed the ability to practise a single lesson as many times as I needed to learn the spelling (Memrise is certainly not the only company in this sector that seems determined to impose a one-size-fits-all vision of learning on its users…). I’m in the middle of making a very long and complex course as a companion to the Duolingo Greek course’s new tree that I will open to the community when it’s ready, or at least that was my plan but since it won’t be ready by January 2022 I suppose it will just be deleted instead. Something that @BenWhately seems to be ignoring is that some users actively enjoy making courses! They don’t want an automated program to make such things for them. I find that the process also helps me to learn the words, think about their grammatical gender etc.
Memworld does not sound like the type of platform that I would want to use. I understand @BenWhately’s argument about wanting to integrate the two platforms (Memworld and Memrise) but it seems as though the company has convinced itself that it’s an either/or situation. I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
Based on what I understand from the announcement and Ben’s responses in this thread, I think you can be rest assured that user-generated language-related courses will not be gone. Keep on working on your Greek course. Thank you for the efforts!
I can’t be sure. The new system is still conceptual and visionary, but from what I understand, I see no reasons why kanji courses would be excluded from the new system. Ben’s vision seems to be to build a more comprehensive platform for learning languages. While non-language courses may not fit in this vision, kanji courses definitely do.
Also,
So in any case, you don’t need to worry about kanji courses being deleted for the time being.
Of course, I’m just a regular user. It’d be better if @BenWhately or any Memrise admin could answer.
Still, my question remains: How is one supposed to learn Kanji without mems? Before Heisig invented and published his learning system, which is completely based on mems, it took many frustrating years of study to learn Kanji!
Maybe the users in your research didn’t interact with mems because of how memrise is set up. I remember in 2018 on the app it actively showed mems together with new words and encouraged you to make your own.
Obviously users wouldn’t interact with it if you hide it away behind some menus. It’s the same as the learning stats. I used them a lot more when they were accessible with one click on on the old dashboard.
Please reconsider.
Also, this is some scary stuff people are talking about. I wouldn’t like to see any of the community courses removed. Why would you do so much to fix what isn’t broken?
From what I’ve seen with the new web experience, it’s everything but intuitive.
Unfortunately, the script is not something that will be useful on its own. Although I do plan to upload it somewhere, it is written in Wolfram language, so I expect that there wouldn’t be many people who are able to run it. (I tried to write a javascript version first, but failed to do so because of too little experience with it)
Still, I can offer to process any requests (there were none so far, so I don’t think there will be too many of them to simply process all myself) and upload results for everyone to use. All I need are the names of memrise accounts (which, as I understand, may differ from the forum names) to save memes from.
My current plan is to check all-time leaderboards for the courses I use (because prominent mem creators are likely to be among active learners), and archive as much of their mems as I can. (unfortunately, memrise does not allow to directly see the mems, created by other users, that I chose to use in my studies)
This is quite an optimistic interpretation. What he said was
which is quite vague. He didn’t say that it would mean all the courses, and seeing how it was just decided that mems are a thing that people do not use enough and therefore do not need, I would still be pretty much worried for a lot of community courses.
Even the ones that will be migrated might become much less structured or even ripped into many pieces, because on the new platform
