I recently returned to Memrise after a hiatus as I renewed my resolve to learn Chinese characters. I came back because, in years of studying, I have not found a more effective way to learn characters than the creative and clever community developed mems which broke down complex characters into their radicals, explained the meaning of radicals, and sometimes even explained why the radicals actually look like the meaning of the character as a whole.
When I first started using memrise again, I noticed that there were no mems popping up, but I thought maybe the course I’d chosen had none or perhaps they needed to be enabled somewhere. I tried a couple courses over the last few days and finally decided that without mems, there’s really nothing that makes memrise more useful to me than any other app and actually there are Chinese specific ones that are generally more useful. Imagine my disappointment to learn that mems have been done away with all together. They are super useful for monosyllabic languages like Chinese. I’m going to switch back to using Chinese specific apps because Memrise is now ineffective and frustrating for learning characters.
Even if your research showed that few people used the mems (btw, how do you measure that? I just used the first mem that was shown because it was good, just because I didn’t create a new one or looked at all of them, doesn’t mean I didn’t use them), the decision to remove them to me seems unreasonable. This is literally what your name is build on. Did anyone ever complain about it? If you want to add new ways of learning, great, but you could have at least left it to the users to decide what works for them and if they like the mems or not. Sorry, but your explanation for this is really weak, especially if you promised in the past to keep them.
Also I feel like this wasn’t announced properly, I guess you wrote it somewhere but I’m pretty sure in-app it hasn’t been shown, so I assumed it was just a bug for a while until I contacted the support…
Also, it wasn’t replaced by anything ‘better’ so why not at least keep it until there was an acual alternative?
I’m really unhappy with this decision, if there’s any way you can bring them back, I would really appreciate it.
People are fleeing duolingo left and right because of their latest update. They followed the memrise playbook and removed beloved features that no one wanted gone. If memrise added mems again, I would 100% pay for annual subscription. These apps keep removing effective learning techniques.
The memes were the best thing about Memrise. Without them I might as well try and learn with a piece of paper. I used to praise and recommend based on the memes. Can’t see why they don’t just sit in the background.
I am reading this in 2023, after months spent wondering why the best feature of Memrise had suddenly disappeared. This is really dumb and awful. Made me regret paying for the unlimited membership.
Way to screw us over without even consulting us, your PAYING customers. No wonder we’re flocking onto other apps. You really suck.
This post in sum: “Hey guys, we’re removing the Mem out of Memrise, thus drastically changing the product some of you already paid for based on some bs statistics and studies that we are not going to show you and without even asking what you think about it. OUR DECISION IS FINAL, SUCK IT UP.”