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
I think we would all welcome some further clarification of where the plans now stand, preferably in a separate forum thread as another poster suggested above. Ben said he intended to return to the forum sometime this evening. Hopefully, he’ll bring us that clarity.
I’d like to highlight some points which I think are important.
It’s obvious that Memrise and Memworld are designed for different audiences. Memrise is serving for vocabulary learners who are using it as an additional tool in their studies, while Memworld is for those who want to learn new languages in all aspects. Why do you want to meld these audiences into one, when they are different? Memrise users have reasons to do it their way, they could already have a teacher and all materials they need.
Why you can’t build a separate website for Memworld, since everything says that it will provide different services than Memrise? At the same time you could use specific Memrise and Memworld features to complement each other if there is such need. Why you can’t let Memrise live its own life?
Why do you think that your learning method is superior and every Memrise user should follow it? You have found out an alternative method youself, but anyways you are behaving like generic model is good for everybody.
If someone is interested in your vision and product, it’s impossible to judge it in any practical way, because of its non-existence. Why don’t you build it in the first place and show it to those who are interested? At the moment you are offering a pig in a poke and taking away things that users need and paid you for.
I can not help but notice that this situation is not unique, we’ve already been there before. You are eliminating a feature or offering something that no one asked you about, and then you coming to realisation that you were wrong. Why your team is so neglectful about users learning interests and incapable to hear? There are dozens if not hundreds of things you could do to improve Memrise, but you are as always trying to sell something unwanted.
Again, @BenWhately, for the love of, please address the typing thing. I don’t know if you’re intentionally skating around it, or if it’s some (hard to imagine, since so many people have commented about it) oversight, but come on. Some of us humble payin’ customer folk are in no position to do zoom calls and whatnot (and aren’t you guys, like, 6 time zones away from the US anyway?), yet still want our questions answered. Will you please return the type-only review option, and if not, why THE HELL not?
Sorry if you did respond and I missed it. This is just a really important feature. Please don’t arbitrarily ax it.
I understand your worries. Ben’s statements have been quite vague, probably because he hasn’t yet developed a clear vision. But he did say “as many courses as are needed” except “many of which [that] are not used at all”, so I guess I’m not being too optimistic.
Perhaps I was right that Ben had planned to retire non-language courses, but it seems that Ben has backed down by saying that we would discuss a way to manage the left-over non-language courses, just like how he backed down by promising that mems would not be permanently removed under the outcry here (I still believe that the permanent removal of mems was the original plan). The important thing here is that he backed down, which gave me a reason to be optimistic.
Anyway, instead of interpreting Ben’s words as if they were from the Bible, perhaps it’s better to notify him of our worries and wait for his clarifications.
