Still no response? I hope @BenWhately will address these in tomorrow’s meeting.
Agreed. Immersion needs to be 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a year or two. In other words go and live in your target country. And when you get there you will still find yourself making vocabulary lists, flash cards, still find yourself looking for a web site to help you with vocabulary learning. Immersion isn’t that great for learning vocabulary fast. English speaking 7 or 8 year olds have their grammar in place but still have a long way to go with lexis.
EveryThingButKitchenSinkLangWorld, I like. My suggestion would be BathwaterNoBaby.
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Finally tried the new experience. All that came up was 4 item multiple choice. No reinforcement from typing or anything. It was quick. And I have already forgotten what I learned.
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Despite being quite an active Memrise user for 6 years, I haven’t been active on this forum until the current crisis. Today, I’ve been reading old threads of complaints and I came across this, written by @cos:
I’m not the only person who spent a huge amount of time creating courses on memrise back when they were actively nurturing the community and community-created courses. I literally spent thousands of hours on my courses, over several years. For the fish idenfitication course, I took thousands of photographs myself, identified them and cropped and edited and labelled them, sorted them, etc. For the Hebrew course, I actually paid someone else with my own money to record voice for many of the items, so I could have two different people’s voices for each word or phrase, to help people get a better sense of how to say or hear things.
I quote him/her here, just in case anyone here doesn’t have an idea how much effort some users have paid in creating and maintaining their courses. It would be unethical and shameful of Memrise not to realize their responsibility to keep UGCs in good shape. People wouldn’t be willing to spend thousand of hours contributing to this site unless they believed that the development team wouldn’t treat their time and effort as if they were nothing. I have nothing but huge respect to the users-contributors of Memrise.
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What happened to Mems in Alpha/Beta? I rely on those to write in example sentences!
Update: I just found out why now. Is it possible to create a new column for me and just transfer whatever I wrote on the mems to the new column? So I won’t have to make sample sentences all over again!
Looking at the screenshots of older Memrise, I wish I had experienced more of that. I started using a UCG course that accompanied the Korean learning resource (TTMIK) I was using in 2017, and Memrise helped me learn a lot as an accompanying tool. Since then, I’ve used other UCG courses, and I’ve also been continuously adding to one of my own. However, the one I’ve been making for myself is based entirely on things I’ve seen from a variety of native Korean sources (dramas, random youtube videos, things coworkers have said); it’s pretty much only useful to me. All this talk of getting rid of “less popular” UGC courses is very worrisome. I’ve put loads of time into that course, and I’m well aware that it’s designed entirely for my own benefit, but I wasn’t aware that meant it might have an expiration date, just because I’m the only user. I’ve never used the official courses much, because they have the same problem as most other language apps: languages are not a one-size fits all situation, so weird expressions and unnatural sentence structures keep getting taught. That’s why Memworld scares me so much: it’s just going to be another attempt at a one-size-fits-all, which doesn’t work.
I agree with a lot of the complaints on here. There are so many ways the website and app could be improved, but this doesn’t seem like a step back for two steps forward, it’s just a step in the wrong direction entirely. The reason I use Memrise is because it’s right for my purposes: to help reinforce things that I learn elsewhere, with a reasonable amount of customizability, and a pretty easy to use UI. I don’t need or want anymore Duolingo copycats, because those have never worked for me. I want an SRS flashcard service that’s easy to add things to, that forces me to type. That’s why I use the only-typing tampermonkey script, too.
If Memrise makes it so I can’t use that script, I’m quitting and moving to Anki. But the worst thing is all the vagueness, and lack of clear communication. I don’t even know whether I should keep adding things to my Memrise decks or whether I should start exporting stuff to Anki and trying to figure it out again. I don’t want to have to do that, but if you take away the typing only (and I still can’t for the life of me understand why that needs a script anyway instead of being an inbuilt feature) I’m gone.
There are so many things that could make Memrise better, and this is none of them. I would love an inbuilt toggle option for different kinds of tests; for example, I hate multiple choice for any vocabulary words, but there are some UCG courses I use containing long sentences that would actually maybe be preferable with multiple choice. As other people have said, the ability to override a wrong answer would be great. I would also like the ability to override correct answers if you know you don’t know it as well as you like, not just add it to difficult words, because difficult words is a feature that I want to like but feel is underdeveloped. The inbuilt ability to turn auto-accept on and off would be great. I wish it was easier to move entries in your own courses from one level/category to another. I wish you could toggle the option to display the level/category during your reviews. (Would save me a ton of time as I label my vocab words based on where I learned them from, but I have to retype them in an attribute every time to get it to show up.) This is very specific, but my absolute dream would be some kind of add-on that automatically adds saved entries in my Naver Korean-English dictionary wordbook to my Memrise course.
I’ve never used Mems much, but it’s not because I wouldn’t find them useful, it’s because they’re inaccessible. If you made them easier to access, make, and use, I would use them. Period. I tried adding a couple to my UGC, but it never helped because it took forever to figure out how to add them and then they wouldn’t usually show up anyway. I just started using attributes instead. It would also make me more likely to use other courses if Mems were more accessible, cause Mems being inaccessible is a lot of the reason I just kind of gave up and started making my own giant personal customized course.
I think I’ve rambled a bit here, so sorry about that, but the main thing is, I have found Memrise extremely useful for a number of years. I’ve never posted on any of the community things before because I was just using it by myself, but I couldn’t just let this pass by without adding my two cents. I don’t want to see Memrise turn into another bland language learning center that can’t possibly replicate immersion because apps can’t do that; I want it to improve on what it already does well, which is help me memorize stuff that I need to memorize. That’s why it’s Memrise. Memworld should just be a separate thing that I ignore, if it’s anything at all.
For what it’s worth, I’m a paid user and I used to recommend Memrise to other people studying the same language as me. If they get rid of all the reasons I use it, I can’t do that anymore.
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4???
how many centuries would one need to finish courses with 500 to 6000 items??? is this especially designed to push away the public from user generated content towards short memrise official courses???
leave please the site as it is now, please
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Well, there is no setting to learn 4 words, hence I’d assume that there were only 4 words left in whatever level @wodehouse was learning.
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Hi all, just a quick message to say we’ve updated the How can I save my mems? section to list a couple more methods. You can see them below:
Does it imply that mems won’t be back earlier than mid June 2022? When, then, approximately?
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Also, your announcement still says,
Yet, @BenWhately says,
And,
So there are two different messages here: The announcement says mems will be removed permanently because it is believed that too few people use them; Ben says mems will be taken down temporarily because of technical issues and will be reintroduced asap.
Do you also see the need to amend this part of the announcement?
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Honestly, it is quite appalling that you even considered launching the new site and retiring the old when the new site doesn’t allow people to access Mems. The fact that you’re going ahead with this plan underscores how little you value the platform and community - something we’ve known for about 5 years now, so nothing new. You just keep highlighting your contempt for us over and over and over.
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Yes, finally, when I switched to the language option, it appeared! Thank you! Not sure why the other options don’t show it, but whatever. I have what I need at this point.
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So it’s come to the point that Memrise Support recommends that we use Memrise2Anki as a way to deal with the fallout from their latest “innovation”. This looks to me either like an admission of incompetence, or a not-so-thinly-veiled invitation to the disgruntled crowd to go screw ourselves. Is there another way to look at this that I’m missing?
And thanks for the links by the way. I note with amusement that user-written scripts are now offered as a semi-official solution to the problems created by the management’s strategic choices. Suggested next step: Since those choices were apparently caused by difficulties with maintaining the old code, perhaps users can now be asked to do the maintenance too? I’m guessing there might be enough enthusiasts here who’d maintain (and improve) your handling of mems for free just to make sure you don’t kill them off.
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I spoke too soon. The first session of 5 words or expressions brings up only 4 item multiple choice. The next session brings up the same 5 words or expressions but with typing etc. It works differently but it still works. Sorry for the premature criticism.
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This is how the Memrise Subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/memrise/) describes Memrise… Interesting to note.
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Exactly. “The best team we ever had in place” can’t or don’t even bother to make a download tool, and then they say something like:
Too much contradiction in this. I won’t trust Memrise a dead rat if you ask me.
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Welp. Before this had all started I had never heard of Anki and was happily paying Memrise for a service I found useful.
Fast-forward to today and I’m exporting all of my courses out of Memrise and into Anki and I’ve started looking into ways I can contribute to that community.
In doing so, I’ve discovered a platform that’s more flexible and a dramatically better experience than what Memrise is becoming and to boot, I’ll end up getting something for free that I was happily paying for up to this point.
Well played, Memrise. What a truly magnificent self-own. The next time you want to “take one step back to take two steps forward”, you might want to take a quick look over your shoulder to ensure you aren’t standing next to a cliff.
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Personally I’ve moved to more specialised websites.
For example, for improving my Spanish, I use https://www.spanishdict.com which is a million times better than Memrise in my opinion - at least for my use. The grammar lessons are excellent and the vocabulary section is much better than that of Memrise. One feature that I particularly like is that instead of “learning” words, they first test you to see if you already know them - and if you do, it will just mark that word as learnt straight away.
For Korean I’ve used https://talktomeinkorean.com and for Japenese https://www.wanikani.com.
There are a lot of extremely decent alternatives to Memrise out there, especially if you’re willing to use a website that specialises in just one language.
https://www.busuu.com is also decent for a handful of languages, especially for learning grammar and concepts. I wouldn’t use it exclusively for learning vocabulary, but it’s a very nice supplement when used in combination with another service which is better at vocabulary.
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So now that Memrise have removed everything that made it useful what sites are people moving to? Anki seems like a good option. Is there anything else?
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