I am deeply disappointed and terribly frustrated that you are removing mems that I personally created for the JLPT Japanese kanji courses that my Japanese teacher painstakingly created for his students using Memrise. He chose Memrise over Anki but I guess he regrets his choice now.
I have created 400+ personal mems which help me tremedously to remember the 400+ kanji we need to know to pass the JLPT N5 and N4 exams. Reviewing these kanji without the mems I created myself will totally nullify the gains that I have made to date. If I forget the meaning of a certain kanji, I always go back to the mem to help me remember. I was planning to do this for the JLPT N3 course that my teacher created but trying to study kanji without mems to help me learn and memorize them is completely useless.
Why don’t you make a compromise and let those who created their own mems to keep them and let them be part of their customized courses? Why penalize those actually have created and use mems? Unlike those you say that don’t use mems, I absolutely do and find them to be an essential component of my learning. You can check my stats and mems. I speak the truth!
I tried the beta again. It looks like you added the repeating with only typing again? I’m really thankful for that! What I’m still missing though is an option to turn on and off the sound during a lesson. Would it be possible to add that too?
Are you a Memrise admin? These are kanji courses for my teacher’s students only. They were not created for the Memrise community or for public consumption. Unfortunately, I don’t have permission to share or post the links to the courses as I was not the one who created them. I only created customized mems for the kanji covered in the courses.
What will become with the structure of the courses? Will you remove levels?
Will it be possible to add words and phrases which are not in your database?
Why the community courses have to migrate? Why you can’t keep them as they are and where they are? Can we choose where our courses will stay?
Will you remove attributes from the cards data?
In other words, there’s more than one way to break the community courses and “nothing is happening to the community created courses” is not exactly the truth.
I can’t go into too much detail on this because it is months away, we haven’t done any technical discovery yet alone design or coding for the new system for community content, so no one has precise answers on anything. But that is why I say nothing is changing on community courses, because they will be staying as they are for probably a good 6 months and they are not blocking any of the other work we are doing so there’s no need for imminent changes on our end.
But these are the best answers I can provide:
1- Levels will be replaced with scenarios inside a language, there will not be courses in the new platform, just a language. But there should still be ways to follow scenarios in a designated order by creators just not in a ‘course’. I hope you can agree that people want to learn French, not 27 separate French courses.
2- Yes we intend to let people add words and phrases outside our official content, we know full well we can’t cover all items ourselves
3- At least initially I believe community courses will be copied, not migrated. So you’d be able to use either system.
4- I don’t know of any plans to alter attributes on the cards. The web learning sessions rebuild you can test now in beta and Android will be available soon. It’s unlikely attributes will work exactly the same for content created in the new system because the current system is a bit strange for those who’ve not been using it for 10 years, but as I said we really have no designs yet.
that sounds terrible… Generation snowflake cannot cope with anything else? replacing the mess and dangers of life (old memrise, lol) with a tidy, dictatorial, artificial one-size-fits-all.
Btw, what for incentives should users have to add content to your scenarios? I am picky, prefer the illusion of choice among 1027 French courses, not 27.
the conclusion seems: in 6 months user generated content shall be effaced. Ok, got it
he conclusion seems: in 6 months user generated content shall be effaced.
I’m creating an Hungarian course for English(US) speakers and the same course for German speakers. This is a lot of work!!! I’m eager to create courses with information about grammar, example sentences, pictures, audios, videos and so on. See it with your own eyes: “Ungarisch = Freude, Audios & Videos” and “Hungarian - Joy, Audios & Videos”.
What will happen with these courses in the next time?
Can MEMRISE create equivalent material, teach and maintain them?
I’m nosey! @BenWhately Give me your response as soon as possible, please!
I feel like I have to be understanding this wrong. So in approximately six months, all of the hard work we put into creating community courses, some of us over the course of many years, will vanish, then or some indefinite time shortly after that? This is shocking and disappointing to put it mildly. Please tell me I am wrong. I have used memrise for years and put hours upon hours into making courses with very specific content, presented in specific ways, for my learning goals and also to the benefit of other language learners. And to say nothing of the many user-created courses I have used over the years with content that simply cannot be found in any other language learning platform. This is a huge loss. It is devastating to think of losing such an amount of work. Please tell me I am misunderstanding all this.
What does that even mean?1- Levels will be replaced with scenarios inside a language, there will not be courses in the new platform, just a language. But there should still be ways to follow scenarios in a designated order by creators just not in a ‘course’. I hope you can agree that people want to learn French, not 27 separate French courses.
You really need to be more forthcoming about your intentions. I spend a lot of time creating private courses for the things I am trying to learn and if it’s all going to disappear in six months it would be pretty disappointing and a waste of my time as well as money paying for Memrise.
Fortunately, you are completely wrong.
In six months we will start work on a new way to create community content.
The new way will allow you to use official Memrise audio and video in community courses, but still let you add words not in the official Memrise content because of course we can’t cover every word in the world ourselves. With a new system we hope to bring creation and editing to mobile which is not feasible with the current system built in 2012 or so and we will definitely have the ability to search and join this content from the mobile apps.
No one is just going to kill the current system. We don’t see any technical blocker to running both systems in parallel for a significant period.
Once the new system is built (which will be several more months after we start the process), it will be made available to test and we hope people will like it and start using it.
We will offer tools to copy existing community content into the new system and will probably do a lot of this automatically to make adoption easier for you. And I emphasise this is copying not migrating so the content is in both systems, it will still be in the old system for use.
I recognise there is uncertainty and I can’t provide precise answers to every question because it is still a long time away, but I would ask you to approach it with a positive mindset, this is a very long overdue investment in the community content functionality we want to make because we recognise how valuable it is to the community and our business.
I don’t agree. Your vision seems to only care about beginners and perhaps intermediates, who aims at being generally conversational in the target language. It does not cater advanced learners and learners with specific needs, who do want separate courses that serve their needs.
I may want to learn French words from Victor Hugo’s works. I may want to learn Japanese words from some mangas (see TinyCaterpillar’s courses). I may want to learn German words to pass the C1 exam. I may want to learn Spanish words that relate to inorganic chemistry (such a course exists!). How could your “scenarios” possibly serve my needs? Is there going to be a scenario of “French 19th Century Literature Workshop”, or “Spanish Inorganic Chemistry Conference”?
I’ve tried to keep up to date with the situation regarding Mems by reading all these post (some by the team) and I was under the impression that we can save ours for now (but not the ones we use) but they will eventually reappear.
I’ve just re-read ► your link ◄ about them (and you did promise to keep it updated) it gives me the strong impression Mems will go.
I’ve attached an extract rather than the actual text.
The new system will not stop what you want to do.
My comment was about how the user interface will be in the new system. Right now you can be subscribed to many different courses, all with their own streak, their own review counts, with duplicated words between courses you have to ignore manually and you end up with a massive list of courses, it is not an optimal system and is frankly extremely confusing for anyone who hasn’t used it for years.
We believe that a language learner would be better off having all their french content in a single place. Within that you can add “scenarios” (lists of words) you want to learn, these could be made by memrise, by yourself or other users and be of any difficulty.
Also happy new year to you.
That’s because the backend systems were not capable of supporting the function anymore, it was an extremely large query ran over a very large set of database tables that had to be ran live to reflect a user’s latest progress and any edits to courses. It was completely unscalable as user numbers grew.
The new system is being built from the ground up around this central concept of adding words to a language and managing that.
What happens to a users course in a given language? If say someone has a course with 40 levels in it and 3000 words, what is going to happen to it? How would it be integrated into a single language spot as a ‘‘scenario’’. What will happen to users own audio recordings?
Thanks for the response, James. It’s a groundbreaking one, because five years after the removal of auto-ignore, it’s the first time we receive an honest explanation. Over the years, the official reason for the removal was that it didn’t work well with non-Latin scripts and too few people used it! I protested against the removal back in 2016, and I still keep a record of a response written by one of your employees, Ms. Lien Rakuscek:
…There were lots of problems with that feature. It didn’t work properly especially for languages and courses with multiple alphabets such as Chinese/Pinyin, Japanese(Kana, Kanji, Hiragana)/Romaji. Very few people actually used this feature, partly because it isn’t available in the Apps but mainly because the majority of people don’t need such feature. Therefore we can’t justify investing our very scarce resources into something that would only benefit a few people and not necessarily improve the overall quality of our platform.
You see, this is the problem with Memrise that really needs to change. If you have technical problems keeping features (auto-ignore, mems, etc.) alive, why not just say it? Why are you (or your colleagues) obsessed with making up unconvincing excuses (e.g. few people use something) that do not justify the removal at all but only generate outcries? I believe that sincerity is a necessity for genuine communications.
