How will this work for “unpopular” and rare languages? For me, the main draw of user-created courses is that people have made courses for languages that aren’t typically seen on other language-learning sites, and that are difficult to find resources for. It seems unlikely that languages like West Greenlandic, Luxembourgish, and Occitan would be integrated into this new site format you’re talking about, which means that if all the old user-created courses are retired, you’d be nixing a rare and invaluable resource for people who are interested in less common languages.
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You and me both! I use many courses for rarer languages that would likely be cut out by this decision; considering the volume of user-created courses on the site, I imagine that courses with only a few learners (or even only a few hundred) will be considered too unpopular to bother migrating over.
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Hear hear.
No language-learning website can be everything and do everything all on its own. I regularly use 5-6 (depending on the language) online resources for my language-learning, and even more offline resources (books, audio, films/TV, etc.). Memrise is amazing for what it is, and it’s one of my favorite online resources for vocab-building, but - as you said - I don’t need it to be my all-in-one language teacher, nor do I think that’s even something that’s possible for a single site to do.
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Like most, I strongly disapprove. Please here your clients.
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I remember 30 or 40 years ago when immersion learning became an educational buzzword. Naive and technically ignorant educators thought immersive real-world context learning systems would be a great boon for education. I had a computer background (early days of PC, C++, etc.), and was interested in getting into the development of AI guided learning systems. The immersive real-world learning meme was like a pop-star concept among educators. To be fair, it might have been valid to some extent, if the effort and money put into making big-profit computer games had been put into developing education software and AI enhancement of teaching systems.
There were two major problems with development of immersion (aka, real life context learning). The first, perhaps more relevant to the current Memrise controversy, is that some things are simply learned better using some form of rote, mechanical learning, or an extension of it like the original Mems. For example, multiplication tables or basic physics formulas, or biological concepts, which can be more deeply learned in real situations after initial rote learning. Note that, depending on personality and learning style, some people don’t want or need an immersive environment at early stages of their learning. Immersion can actually distract and degrade from benefits of the genuine scientific principle of spaced, performance-adaptive practice. As a higher education instructor in the educational field, I remember reading research that compared groups learning a concept through simply being tested, and working on memorizing / understanding the correct answer, vs. groups learning the concept through contextualized-immersion form of learning the concept. The group that spent their time on old-fashioned taking a test and working on learning the correct answers did better on a final conceptual test than the group in the contextualized-immersion form of learning.
This leads to the second problem - the time, effort, money, resources, creative technical and user-interface (UI) talent, etc. needed to actually design, develop, test, and modify a genuinely and significantly beneficial immersive real life environment learning system. Easy for educators to cheerlead the idea, but only a small fraction of them would get involved in doing the grueling multimedia software design and development, or having the technical skill and creative knack for designing a computer-based learning environment. And to be competent at product testing and modifications from feedback by real users. If folks could do that, they would be most likely working for big $$$ in business UI applications or gaming development.
Maybe it’s easier these days. But given the unpopular changes and aggravating bugs that have occurred in the relatively simple Memrise platform, I’m doubting some motley featured functional immersion system would be a dog that hunted, for a long while, anyway.
By the way, the new grandiose immersion system should not have a name related to Memrise, since Mems as they have been known from the beginning appear to be back-staged if not repressed or minimized.
How about:
EveryThingButKitchenSinkLangWorld
or
ImmersiveLangWaterboardingWorld
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Where’s the button allowing me to review words from multiple courses? It was already annoying having to switch courses manually to get your vocab reviews done, and now you’re ported that layout to the desktop website?
Is this an attempt at saving costs by streamlining the interface design? If so, you streamlined it into the wrong direction and scarified usability.
Select a language in the filter in the top left, then the button is a watering can icon on the right.
You may have to open the side drawer with the arrow button on the right
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Thank’s a lot! I wonder why this button is hidden away like that.
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Thanks! Good lord, that’s unnecessarily buried.
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I wonder how skewed your research is? How can people use mems if they are difficult to access on many of the learning platforms? It seems as if memrise has intentionally hidden mems, made them difficult to access and then penalized the community for not using them…
also how can memrise get rid of mems? It’s the name sake. Mems are what made memrise unique and stand out from all the other SSR websites. If you get rid of mems, theres very little to make you stand out.
Mems are also an integral part of my workflow.
Goodbye memrise, I wish you hadnt changed.
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Thanks for pointing that out. After some hunting, I did find it. But why hide it and make the default to click on each separately? Kind of unintuitive for the user, plus the old design just looks better with the “Review” link at the top of the main page.
One feature that I’ve been wishing for for years is the ability to mark a wrong answer as “just a typo” with a daily limit to deter cheating. Yes, designers?
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I don’t really mind the mems disappearing because I never really used them and kind of forgot about them (It’s hard to find them so I forgot about them quickly. Maybe if you make them easier to find, people will use them more)
My biggest problem is that I’ve heard that the typing option is being taken away. It would be fine for me to use only multiple-choice while learning French but Korean and kanji would be hard to learn without forcing myself to learn each part of it. I could just look at part of the option and then see that it’s a vocab term.
I understand that you guys are already sure about taking the mems away but consider having the typing option as an option in the settings
Isn’t that a good thing tho lol
Please bring back ‘Esc’ shortcut and ‘Edit’ link please!
These are key features for course creators who improve them during their learning sessions.
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Well, at least I’m within the 30 days for a refund from being a new subscriber? I’ll be taking my time and money elsewhere, but I feel bad for the people who have invested a lot of theirs here and are now unhappy. When I was studying Chinese a few years back, mems were fantastic for learning characters… and they were great for Hebrew too.
When you have a feature that’s great and unique, but many of your users don’t use it, maybe you should spend some time showing them it’s there and how to use it rather than upsetting the customers who knew it and loved it.
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Yes! Have been wanting this feature for a very long time as well.
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Also, does the new “Difficult words” session just plainly shows you what you are supposed to type?
Which is bad by itself, but when writing in kanji it also turns the input line into a complete mess:
Since the sign language courses aren’t structured in the same way as other languages, will they survive the change?
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Memrise is the biggest anti-consumer company I’ve ever seen. You guys constantly manage to enrage your most loyal customers and make the weirdest decisions. Looking back over the years, it’s unbelievable how much potential has been wasted - and now this; you’re finally throwing out the window the very thing that made Memrise what it was in the first place. What the heck is going on?
Edit: I’ve read through the other posts in this thread - and now there’s talks of a new MemWorlds website. Another separate website, just like Decks. So here we go again… >_>
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I’m too worn out from years of protesting Memrise’s ‘updates’ to type too much this time, but I will echo all of the other comments that have been made here: This is very sad to see (though not entirely surprising, if you’ve been following the company), and I think it’s very likely that this update will finally mark the end of my nearly eight years of using this website.
You can just look at my thoughts from the last time they did this. Most of it’s sadly still applicable.
As to their ‘research’ on mems use, I just wanted to point out that this is the same company who claimed that their ‘Next up’ buttons for courses on the homepage, which tell you what you ‘should’ do next (because you can’t make that decision yourself, I guess) had “a fair bit of engineering” behind them, when it literally just generates a random option for each course every time you load the page.
They’re known liars. And not very good ones, frankly.
I loved Memrise back in the day. I was extremely passionate about it, and I loved the whole community aspect. I’m a usually secluded person, who doesn’t engage in many community endeavors, but the beauty I saw in Memrise sucked me right in, and I wanted to be a part of it all. I wanted to pour my heart into creating content for other users, for your website, Memrise. I was just the kind of person your model is designed to attract, the kind your model relied on. But again and again and again, I have been punished for using your product. I kept pushing through, because I was so invested, both in my time and just emotionally. I wanted to see things turn around, to go back to the way they used to be, but again and again and again, I’ve been disappointed. I just can’t do it anymore. It isn’t healthy. A freaking website should not be causing me this sort of long-term stress.
My use of Memrise has dwindled severely in recent years from what it used to be. I find it to be an upsetting thing to deal with now, to even think about, and I just want to ‘get it over with’ every time I do, and as quickly as I can. Your extraordinary anti-consumer practices made that possible, Memrise. You took an extremely passionate user, and you turned her against you. And I can confidently say, from what I have seen personally from other formerly passionate users I’ve interacted with here (and of course the many posts in this very thread), that I am nowhere near the only such story. I don’t understand you, Memrise. I just don’t understand you.
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