Will you be adding a notes feature?
@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.
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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…
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Absolute trash, it doesn’t even show your streak for words anymore. What is this crap.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I spent a couple of years (!) carefully selecting and crafting mems for my courses.
Now you want me to download them manually? Any idea how much time it will take???
Why are you doing this? Who told you that killing mems is a good idea? Why are you destroying features that make you to stand out from competitors?
I literally cant wrap my mind around your strategy, so absurd it is.
Bring mems back, its one of the pillar selling points of your whole entrprise.
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I remember they said something about bringing back the features they have been removing once their new platform is ready, including Mems (I think).
So they probably won’t consider adding notes, since the Mems will come back eventually, but then again, it may take years for them to come back.
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Thank you for the articulate and well-thought message, huguesm. My heart is truly sad. Today is a bad day for language lovers, but also, as you pointed out, a big step towards overturning a certain initial Memrise philosophy hinged upon swarm intelligence and user-generated content.
I took the liberty of taking an excerpt from your intervention and putting it as a header description on the courses I have created. I hope you won’t mind.
I’ve just tried out the new dashboard and learning sessions - there seem to be a few things missing that I used every day (the obvious lack of mems aside).
Is there any likelihood that the “words learned” counter from the front page will return, and the stats (accuracy and time) from the end of a learning session page? I also used the “levels” button from the session complete screen a lot, to jump back into the word list for that level.
And, there no longer seems to be a number on the Review button at the end of each session. I now no longer have the ability to see how many more words I have left to go!
I do like the new percentage complete stat on the dashboard for each course though, and the bigger fonts used in places!
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I’m posting on memrise for the first time to say how incredibly disappointed I am that mems are being removed. Your '“research” on mem usage is a sad excuse to retire old code without creating a replacement. How can you completely ignore hundreds and hundreds of users who are begging you not to remove a piece of core functionality? Mems are truly unique and tapped into a higher form of memorization that people don’t use. I won’t be using memrise anymore and will actively be seeking an alternative resource. Overdesign kills apps all the time. You’re doing it right now.
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So frustrated with the new design rollout, first of all my streaks were just erased… Multiple with over 200+ days… Why completely flop sides where the leadeboard and your score is? Why make streaks a tiny minisule part of the design (when I’m sure thats the reason a significant population come back consistantly daily)?
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I just canceled my subscription due to these forced changes, not willing to pay for this new UX, thanks
"Membership status: Memrise Pro since March 25, 2018
Your Pro subscription has been cancelled. Your access to Pro expires on 2022-04-10"
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Hi @MemriseSupport,
A few complaints:
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More generally, the previous layout was great and sufficient. Change for the sake of change was not needed. I imagine and recognize that people works hard on it, but can we get back the old layout?
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It would be nice to get back the ability to “move forward” after finishing a typing test. Previously, after typing a correct or incorrect answer, a user could hit “enter” and move to the next screen, skipping any audio or built-in delays. Now, we have to wait until the end of the audio and built-in delays, which sometimes are a bit long and not desired.
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It would be nice to restore the ability to star / mark things as “difficult” at the end of a session. I do not want to waste precious seconds starring / un-starring words during a test, nor do I know in advance that I need to practice a specific word more or less.
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What the holy hell did you folks do to the difficult words review? Reviewing is not the same as re-learning words. Being forced to re-learn words, i.e., introduction page and guidance on spelling, is redundant with the preview feature. i literally used the “review difficult words” feature everyday to help practice specific words. The new functionality makes marking words as difficult as somewhat useless now.
Clearly, the Memrise user base is unhappy with the new layout. I wish Memrise reinstated the ability for users to use the previous design / functionality.
- richard
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nooooo it’s been rolled out im going to puke ;-;
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So, Memrise. Hi there.
Three questions:
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How do you think this rollout is going so far?
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Does the feedback you’ve received to date align with what you expect a successful product update to look like?
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Is there anything that you’ve learned from what you’ve heard so far that’s going to influence the decisions you make going forward?
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I’m really happy with the typing only option which is one of the so very few positive novelties that I was able to witness over a very long time.
But, apart from not listening to their user-base (and @BenWhately having quietly left the scene again), it’s also very fascinating to see that the Memrise team seems to now have brought all the negligence to the web. I mean the same negligence that has characterized updates on (at least) the Android platform for years.
There’s already a ton of reports about problems or oversights of features that have now gone.
Excuse my sarcasm, but if there’s anything available for deterioration, the Memrise team will surely find it.
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This is currently only broken on firefox and we’re investigating how it can be fixed
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I hate the new dashboard.
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