You’re right. I changed my mind slightly over time and in subsequent edits but didn’t change that portion of the message for some reason.
I do still think prioritizing official courses while also retaining community courses in its own section would be ideal.
From what I’ve read, it seems Memrise is going to keep all of these User-Created Courses, they just want to consolidate the main ones into one main course. Presumably, this means that courses that weren’t consolidated into an official course would remain as-is. So this wouldn’t get rid of non-mainstream languages (which I especially like since I tend to go for less mainstream languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, etc. - although having a professionally-developed course would be even better for these languages).
I feel like if Memrise finishes off some of the other requests like typing-only mode and whatnot, if they then start focusing on producing good official memrise courses that teach vocab and grammar, etc, then it could be quite competitive with Duolingo, especially because of the Community-Created Courses (in Duolingo, creating courses is much more restricted, and even adding features to existing ones is slow and restricted).
Now, to get into some essential language features that I would like to see - Stories is an absolute must, imo. And the idea mentioned previously about having essentially a dictionary for each language on the site cooperates well with the idea of Stories. Something like readlang where you can click on individual words to see their definitions, it then gets added into your vocab that you’re studying, etc.
In language-learning there are two important (and imo obvious) theories - the Input Hypothesis and the Output Hypothesis. Input is about getting as much input from various sources and it being slightly harder than your current level, and Output is obviously about outputting language. Having feedback from this output is also important. This is also why typing-only lessons are important, and why there should probably eventually be voice recognition so people can practice pronunciation.
The final thing I wanted to note was learning methodology - natural method vs. traditional method vs. immersion method vs. Lingua Latina method, etc.
What some of these have in common is that both explicit and implicit teaching is used. Implicit teaching would be not pointing everything out and having the user determine what’s going on themselves by either context or helpful hints (things like highlighting parts of a sentence that has changed in red). Lingua Latina uses both by starting you off with cognates between the native and target language and slowly introducing grammar that’s visible by context. And then this grammar is taught explicitly within the target language. Now you might not need to go this far, but some combination of explicit and implicit teaching I think is better than solely relying on one method.
1- you can choose what you want to learn, and we’re not planning a major change to difficult words mode or anything.
2- We are a platform focused on languages. We have not decided if non-language content will be on the new platform, but will still be on the old system
3- don’t see why not
Thanks James_g for answering questions here; reading your answers I have a much better idea of what memrise is doing and what you are hoping to achieve.
It looks like the glorious A-team left a long time ago. They turned off the heat and the lights. Now Memrise is a cold and dark place. Still, the B-team (aka the Banner team) is doing a good job at degrading Memrise. But wait a minute! It’s research has made some truly remarkable discoveries. The app (ok, they backtracked …) and mems are no longer needed! Maybe soon they’ll figure out that audio and words with more than three letters can be removed, too.
But there’s good news too - I discovered Anki! A much better open source tool. I just added all my courses to Anki. Feels good. Buonviaggio Memrise!
Adding my voice to the many other voices in this thread giving feedback about mem removal.
I discovered this change just recently, as my mobile app updated earlier this week. I was fine dealing with the growing pains of a new UI, but discovering the removal of Mems is intensely disappointing to me.
I like Memrise’s official courses a lot, but they are not what sold me when I re-subscribed for a second year. I’ve been using Memrise primarily for a third-party-created language course from an incredible online Korean resource and the thousands of user-provided Mems have been an amazing help with vocabulary study along the way. People might not need mems in your premium courses, but they’ve been outright essential to me in the 3rd-party course.
The most important things for me are are the community courses, being able to type my answers on the classic review, and seeing my streak for each word at the end. I use Memrise to practice my spelling and keep track of how well I am doing. Without this the website is useless to me.
I guess I can learn to live with the new design, although I hate that everything is huge now and I have to scroll. It’s a pain that it doesn’t mark where the mistake is in the word/sentence in-line. I can’t see anything about the new version that has improved and it just seems like the developers have lost their minds. All we can do is just keep giving feedback and hope for the best.
I totally agree.
The whole point of Memrise is the mems!!.
And what is left when the mems are removed? New users?
The old users will just have to look for new solutions, outside of Memrise
Yes, I already found that I was struggling to progress in the official courses without access to the other mems people had made that gave me ideas. My learning has been very slow without them. I wonder how much of their data showed the proportion of paid users who used mems- I’m cancelling my subscription after this year. How frustrating.
yeah super weird
im thankful, though im still losing patience with memrise as i know i never have to do it ever again after i finish my exams : p (also screw auto emoji ew)
I’m just relieved. I had honestly avoided saying anything because I didn’t want to press the matter, but I reeeeally benefit from being able to leave myself notes on words, not to mention the massive help I get from other people’s mems.
Wow!
What an unexpected decision.
Mems and notes are an essential part of the study.
If you say that no one uses it, maybe the problem is that it’s developed/designed in not a comfortable way, so for users, it’s hard to use?
And instead of removing this feature, let’s try to improve it?
Really hope that you’ll change your mind about this decision
Honestly I don’t think the interface is that bad, a little less user friendly, but not to the point of being relevant (at least for me).
But I will really miss the userscripts, I hope they are updated or someone creates new ones soon, because they were really useful. Also, now you only learn half of the words per session like in the app, which I don’t appreciate, since I used the web version because I could learn faster, but now that is gone.
However, they said this is just a preliminary version, so let’s keep our hopes up that the next updates will fix the problems and make the platform better.
Today I was forced to switch to the new and more terrible version of the Memrise website. There are so many things wrong with it in my opinion. It is as if my evil twin is working at Memrise and telling them to implement everything I hate.
It’s honestly a little baffling to me how the new UI is missing some very basic usability features – the Enter key not advancing to the next page is one of the most annoying for me at least (though there’s some other hotkey/IME related issues that are frustrating as well).
