Memrise has been trying to monetize for years. Ironically I would subscribe simply to keep Memrise the way it is.
My six-year-old son loves this platform is will be crushed when he finds all of his carefully crafted Latin mems will be taken down.
The idea that users don’t like Mems is silly. It’s pretty clear that they haven’t been promoted. I want to use them yet amidst changes to the website I’ve even often struggled to see how I can upload them.
Those who came to this site after reading (and getting inspired by) Moonwalking With Einstein, will have a hard time not feeling that the central vision of this site has died if Mems are taken down.
Don’t do it, please! There’s still time to put up a “YOU SPOKE, WE LISTENED” message.
@ BenWhately
Hi Ben, may I again ask you to answer my question?
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!
Why are you making the desktop site look more and more like an app? Even with me being on a laptop and with the courses now needlessly enlarged there’s still masses of white space on my screen. I can only see two courses without scrolling down and the few things which remained on the home screen have now been hidden inside more drop down menus.
I really miss the space theme from a few years back. This home page looks like it was inspired by Greggs bakery.
they are dumbing it down for slower people, even though making a simple toggle I think is pretty fair, these people update after update have secretly tried to shovel away typing hoping we won’t notice. It really is quite perplexing.
Honestly, I would like it more if you left the possibility of using community-made plugins.
Why not leaving to users the possibility of using the old layout?
I don’t understand
We’re writing now to address some of the feedback we’ve received on the Beta experience.
Firstly, we’re aware that a recent change we made meant that you’re shown fewer typing tests. Our web team is now looking at increasing the percentage of typing tests that appear and the possibility of giving learners the chance to do typing-only sessions across all courses. We understand how important this testing type is for progress and we have no intention of retiring it.
For community-created courses, typing tests should still appear during Classic Review on levels that test on text. If this isn’t the case for you, please leave a comment in this thread so we can investigate further.
The stats graph and streak clock won’t be implemented on the new dashboard on the release date due to technical complexities generated by syncing the new web stack with the backend (i.e. where statistics are calculated). If you’re subscribed to Memrise Pro, you can still see your stats at Memrise or via the Stats button in the side panel on the dashboard.
We’re planning to work on our statistics features in the future and look for improved ways to show progression and more useful learning data, at which point we’ll also consider reimplementing these in the homepage.
We’ve not built a timer into the new sessions, which is why there isn’t an option to enable/disable it in your learning settings. Given that there’s no time pressure, we decided against implementing a pause button. Speed Review is still available for those who prefer to learn under timed pressure.
Lastly, for clarity we have open tickets for the following list of bugs and improvements:
WEBSITE-2859 - Correct answers in typing tests aren’t accepted
WEBSITE-2722 - Hitting the enter/return key to progress doesn’t work
WEBSITE-2695 - Error 500 code in some sessions
WEBSITE-3070 - Points and progress are not saved if the learner closes the tab without clicking on the X icon first
WEBSITE-3214 - On-screen keyboard doesn’t show all special/accented characters
WEBSITE-3202 - Dashboard still displays Difficult Words when they are cleared
We’re aware that this is not a complete list and will continue to work through the feedback collected here and through all our channels.
For further comments or bug reports on the new dashboard, please visit this thread; and for the new learning sessions, this one.
Everything is hidden behind dropdowns now and you have to scroll a lot further to see the same amount of content because border margins are monstrously huge. There’s so much wasted screen space now. Even ignoring the fact that you’re removing mems that at least some people still benefit from, this is just bad web design in general. What was so obsolete about having everything readily visible and easy to click? What do you get out of making the user experience less convenient? The old layout doesn’t feel outdated, it’s efficient and pleasant to look at. I’m no longer going to recommend your service to people looking to learn languages if this is the experience we’re being forced into.
I tried the new interface for a day and I hated it. It looks like it was designed for small screens of phones or tablets. On my 27" monitor it looks ridiculous. I switched back and hoped that I would never be forced to use that abomination.
I am concerned that user generated courses may not be preserved in the future. I only use Memrise to study vocabulary for Esperanto. I have even created a couple of Esperanto courses myself related to specific video games. That kind of content is simply not going to appeal to enough people to be considered worthy of migration.
I currently use Memrise every day and I recommend it to all of my Esperanto friends. I don’t think that will continue after the change is forced on us.
Thanks for reporting this and sorry to be slow in replying to it directly. I’ve just checked and a fix for this is in progress. I believe the support team will update more fully very soon as they have the details. Bottom line, this was not intended behaviour, thank you for reporting it, it is being worked on now.
I consider myself more optimistic than you, because Ben said,
But obviously the Memrise team needs to be much more reassuring given so much worries and concerns.
I will certainly be pushing hard personally to migrate languages like Esperanto and other ones that are not learned by many people. There may be considerations that I don’t yet understand that make it hard - but I believe the system we are building will make it much easier for us to serve less-learned languages really well with high quality content.
Just tried the beta for probably less than 10 seconds, went directly back to the non-beta because I prefer to review all words within a language at once, not have to click on each course separately. Also, as others have suggested above, please keep timed tests, typing tests, and the ability to mute the audio, the latter two of which are vital to my personal desire to continue using Memrise, and which also seem to be important to others.
If you can allow some typing tests then you can allow all. I create courses for myself that aren’t public. They’re used by me but nobody else so it sounds like they may not even be migrated.
As I said earlier multiple choice is lazy and useless for learning. Writing the word or phrase depends on recall which is what we need to actually learn.
It’s quite disappointing that you keep dumbing this site down. Gamification is nonsense for serious learners. I’ve always used the desktop because I hated the gamification on the app. Plus I’m an older person with less than great eyesite and need the bigger screen.
Looks like I’m going to have to use Anki or Quizlet neither of which I particularly like for other reasons but they at least force you to write.
As someone who uses Memrise to learn kanji, I don’t think I will be able to continue using the platform if mems are removed. Mnemonics are an integral part of learning kanji, and most kanji courses rely on them. Helpful community-generated mems are arguably the greatest advantage of Memrise over other options, and without them there really aren’t many reasons to stay.
I don’t have the watering can on the right in my beta version (the option to review all courses from the same language in a combined session rather than one by one). Please fix this. The one by one thing is pretty annoying, and it looks like it’s just broken for me anyway.
On the top left hand side of your dashboard, where it says “Beta” is a yellow flash with a dropdown menu. If you use that to select the category (eg language) that you want to review all your courses from, the watering can mentioned above should appear behind the arrow on the right hand side indicating the total number due for review in that language/category.
