Sorry I did indeed miss that, I’m not sure what you mean by decks in this context, the separate site that was attempted a couple of years ago?
That might be an option for keeping the existing community courses going and not interfering with the new system. We haven’t done the technical discovery on what the range of options are yet.
Yeah, I’m asking about this old project which was closed down without any explanation.
I don’t think anything productive can come of discussing a decision made a few years ago that was controversial both with users and with Memrise staff so I won’t be answering that I’m afraid.
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That’s interesting.
Do I understand it correctly that you can revive Decks in one form or the other given the present situation with Memworld?
It’s on of many possible options, because it is so far away from now we have not done the necessary research of the solutions to know which we will be going down so I cannot provide any further information.
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I suppose that if they leave Memrise at it is and run the new system in parallel, it’s in effect Decks 2.0, isn’t it?
It depends on whether the official courses will remain here. Decks did not contain them.
Yes, but it’s a minor difference. To me, I’d call it “Decks” if: 1) there is a separate website that is the focus of development; 2) all UGCs remain on it in their original format.
THIS IS THE END ;-;
NO MORE GOOD FEATURES ABOUT MEMRISE
THE END OF 2021
have a good new year
BUT NOOO MEMRISE IS GOING TO BECOME TRASH (edit: if it isnt already)
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Come on, the (hopefully temporary) end of mems is not the end of everything. Happy new year!
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I’m still waiting for a “typing tests only” option, because it’s one thing that keeps me very interested in switching to Anki. I’ve seen that you “are looking at it for the new website”, but can you please provide at least the time frame about making the (hopefully positive) decision?
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I was hoping to hear some good news that “classic” Memrise would remain until the new version was ready in a feature complete state. How hard would it be two just leave it up in parallel?
I guess we will see what tomorrow brings and whether Memrise will still be a site that I can use.
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***rise is dead. It is now less effective that using paper flash cards
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This is exactly what’s going to happen as I understand it.
I’ve been very disappointed about the fact that Memrise was about to remove the mems. For me, the mems are very important and vital in my learning. There are so many studies pointing at the fact that you will remember better if you’ve pictures that you can connect to the stuff you want to remember.
For me, it was a happy surprise seeing that the mems were still with us the 2nd of January.
My wish for the new year is to have the mems left as an alternative.
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I have a few questions about this.
- Memrise, as a language platform, is essentially a tool. In language learning, this means that people need to be able to choose how they can use that tool to suit their needs. How will this work for people who already have a high level in a language? Can they practice only their difficult words?
- Will the language system work in the same way as it does now? Someone who e.g. wants to make personal lists for a relatively rare language dialect shouldn’t be forced to choose a language from the list. This also applies to people memorizing facts or other subjects through memrise.
- Will private courses still work? Someone who just makes a quick list to practices words for their test, might not want their list to become one of the publicly available scenarios in that language.
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I’m still waiting for an answer!
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Here’s the way I see this… how Memrise changes could be an amazing competitor to Duolingo, and hopefully a much-needed improvement over Duolingo, or it could be a disaster.
Memrise as it stands right now is not a full langauge-learning website. It’s a website to practice vocabulary, and that’s it. There’s a possibility here that changes can be made to teach languages effectively, and I feel like that was the purpose of some things like “learning with locals”, audio, mems, etc. For this to work, you need well-designed official courses that include listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills, as well as grammar skills.
There is also something to be said to keeping community-created courses for languages that don’t have any official team yet - this is the complete opposite to what Duolingo does, and I think that’s a good thing. Duolingo is too closed and it prevents improvement of courses (As an example, the beta Yiddish course has images and audio, but the Hebrew course that is out of beta and has more learners doesn’t have much audio or images, and duolingo seemingly won’t let them add it - hence the Memrise Duolingo Hebrew course with audio).
The fact is there are already some other flashcard websites and software out there, including Anki. Why does Memrise need to exclusively cater to that? What’s important here is language-learning in general, and I would support anything that makes learning a language better overall.
[Edit: Disregard the below, I’ve changed my mind on this 
]
“Wasted” effort by community volunteers who created flashcards would not be in my priority list when we can have good free courses that teach a langauge more fully. Please don’t fall for the Cost-Sunk Fallacy!
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As far as I understand the auto-ignore situation, it probably didn’t work because it wasn’t doing Unicode Normalization or something, I’m guessing? That could make sense. They would also have to make sure it works with languages that have optional vowels (and therefore, multiple ways of spelling a word - languages like Hebrew and Arabic, for example). I’m guessing the problem was actually matching words together to know if they need to be ignored or not, just based on how the problem was described.
Unicode is hard to deal with, unfortunately. But usually databases have Unicode Collation features to help with this, but maybe it was still too costly on the database?
Unfortunately, computers can’t do everything, even though we may wish they could.
Sorry, just interested in the technical reasons for this, since I’m a (non-professional) programmer
It’s not a sunk cost fallacy, as there are numerous user-created materials that would probably never be substituted by official content, as I mentioned here
and here
So it’s not about sunk cost, it’s about not destroying the precious legacy.
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