I’m late to this conversation, but wanted to give some brief feedback regarding the future of UGC courses as both a creator and frequent user.
Reading through this thread, I am reassured that you have no plans to do away with UGC courses, but intend to make them part of Memrise’s future direction.
I do appreciate there are issues with quality and many courses with very few or no users. That said, it’s important to note (as I mentioned at the meeting you organised in the office a few years ago) that there is a major issue with actually locating good courses - there is often no correlation between quality and number of users (and consequent ranking within a language category) - an old course might have thousands of users simply because it was developed years before a much higher-quality new course, which disincentivises course creators.
Moreover, obscure languages inevitably have few users, but to my mind the greatest appeal of this site is its eclectic range of courses, encompassing minority languages for which there are very few available resources online.
I also have a query about audio. I understand you are still developing your new vision of the site, but would like to know if you intend to retain good-quality current course audio? I have paid native speakers to record all the words for my 5000-word Greek course - I would be devastated if this is replaced by lower-quality generic audio from a database akin to Forvo.
I’m aware that whenever you update the site, you’re often faced with a barrage of criticism here, so really appreciate your continued effort to engage with user feedback on this forum.
You are absolutely right that’s not working on firefox. It does work on chrome though if you would like to switch in the meantime, i shall make a bug report for you on this.
I’ve just been forced over to the new version too.
I might be looking in the wrong place but how do I tell I’ve reached my daily goal? It used to come up with the days and your streak on the home page, which was really encouraging and now I can’t even tell I’ve scored enough points… arghhhhh!
If you refer to the dashboard then look at the tiny little circle. I added the colour-coding to my screenshot that Memrise refuses to create in order to help us to easier distinguish things …
Hi @Eltaurus the enter key is not working on Firefox, but is definitely working on Chrome. I will raise a bug if one does not already exist, but Firefox represents 2.61% of users so it won’t go to the top of the priority queue. I also have a vague memory that we’ve tried to solve this before and it was a problem with firefox that prevented us from resolving it.
Hey @James_g_memrise there is something I’ve been worried about but haven’t seen anyone asking about. Will study groups still be available or you guys have plans to change it somehow? I’m asking because I usually use them to store sets of courses I plan on using later, so it would be good to know if this feature is going to be removed, this way I can bookmark the courses in other way and not lose the results of all the searching I did.
I’ve created courses for my students with thousands of words, and worked over the years to ensure that each word in each course is attached to a high quality mem. For Memrise to decide to remove those mems, to remove thousands of hours of conscientious work and essentially cripple our courses, that we created, is completely unacceptable.
If this decision is not reversed, neither I nor my students will ever use Memrise again.
@SilentShuffle
Improved discovery will be an essential part of a new system, as you point out the current system is pretty poor on that front.
On audio we certainly wouldn’t overwrite people’s existing audio on an existing course.
Excellent, thanks for the reply - that’s really great to hear.
If users could asign a rating to UGC courses (or if that’s not feasible, could ‘like’ courses) that would obviously be a simple way of separating the good from the bad and raising the profile of lesser-known courses…
Here are my two cents about this utterly disappointing decision, speaking about my own experience. I decided to learn German for professional purposes from scratch to C1-C2 in two years (16 months done so far for about two hours a day). An ambitious task, for which I have done and still do a lot of research. Learning to learn. What is the best way to do so as efficiently as possible? What are the best tools available? What should I practice with my personal tutor? What works best for me given my strengths (I speak French and English fluently, and prefer to learn analytically) and weaknesses (I am working full time and have a family, so a good chunk of my study must be done via audio when I run, ski, walk or drive). Despite the best wishes of BenWhately and the Memrise team, no single tool allows this by itself, and a lot of customization is required. This will always remain true for every “serious” learner.
The main challenge experienced by serious learners like me past the beginning honeymoon phase is to learn vocabulary, because there is simply no shortcut to do this: we must learn the most common 5000-8000 words in the target language, including in our domains of interest. Enter Memrise. Memrise, probably by accident, had succeeded in creating the perfect tool for this specific task: well-hidden but amazing courses carefully developed by Memrise users and leveraging its infrastructure, including the shared Mems and knowledge of other users. Now that Mems are gone, not only can we no longer benefit from previous users who thought about the best way to remember certain words, but even worse, we can no longer tailor our own learning to our needs. Where can I add that the best way to learn that “stets” means “all the time” is a photo of Steph Curry with the caption that he has “good stats all the time”? The answer is nowhere on Memrise. Why I am no longer allowed to share this with other users who might find it useful, and spare them the 10 minutes it took me to think about this and upload a meaningful photo? Users did the work for you at the marginal cost of storing photos on your servers. Despite all the noise, the user-generated courses are infinitely more interesting than your standard courses because we can find and share with other people who have similar and sometimes very specific learning objectives. This is not a criticism of the Memrise team, but a criticism of its preposterous belief that a small team can out think the common knowledge of millions of users.
The reasons mentioned earlier in this thread to justify the disappearance of Mems and personnal annotations are puzzling. I simply cannot understand why Memrise has decided to antagonize some of its most loyal supporters by decreasing the quality of its product to such a degree.
Why is difficult words list showing me the answers?! That is ridiculous! Talk about trying to dumb things down. I have been a paying subscriber for about 8 years just to have difficult word list. There is no point in me keeping that subscription if this is how it is going to be.
This did not change since Dec 21th when I wrote it. So let me repeat:
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).
I was used to do reviews without errors. Now about half of entries are marked bad. I really do not want to learn, where exactly your input matcher requires spaces and where not. This change (in context of mandarin language really stupid - see above) made this site unusable for me.
