he conclusion seems: in 6 months user generated content shall be effaced.
I’m creating an Hungarian course for English(US) speakers and the same course for German speakers. This is a lot of work!!! I’m eager to create courses with information about grammar, example sentences, pictures, audios, videos and so on. See it with your own eyes: “Ungarisch = Freude, Audios & Videos” and “Hungarian - Joy, Audios & Videos”.
What will happen with these courses in the next time?
Can MEMRISE create equivalent material, teach and maintain them?
I’m nosey! @BenWhately Give me your response as soon as possible, please!
I feel like I have to be understanding this wrong. So in approximately six months, all of the hard work we put into creating community courses, some of us over the course of many years, will vanish, then or some indefinite time shortly after that? This is shocking and disappointing to put it mildly. Please tell me I am wrong. I have used memrise for years and put hours upon hours into making courses with very specific content, presented in specific ways, for my learning goals and also to the benefit of other language learners. And to say nothing of the many user-created courses I have used over the years with content that simply cannot be found in any other language learning platform. This is a huge loss. It is devastating to think of losing such an amount of work. Please tell me I am misunderstanding all this.
What does that even mean?1- Levels will be replaced with scenarios inside a language, there will not be courses in the new platform, just a language. But there should still be ways to follow scenarios in a designated order by creators just not in a ‘course’. I hope you can agree that people want to learn French, not 27 separate French courses.
You really need to be more forthcoming about your intentions. I spend a lot of time creating private courses for the things I am trying to learn and if it’s all going to disappear in six months it would be pretty disappointing and a waste of my time as well as money paying for Memrise.
Fortunately, you are completely wrong.
In six months we will start work on a new way to create community content.
The new way will allow you to use official Memrise audio and video in community courses, but still let you add words not in the official Memrise content because of course we can’t cover every word in the world ourselves. With a new system we hope to bring creation and editing to mobile which is not feasible with the current system built in 2012 or so and we will definitely have the ability to search and join this content from the mobile apps.
No one is just going to kill the current system. We don’t see any technical blocker to running both systems in parallel for a significant period.
Once the new system is built (which will be several more months after we start the process), it will be made available to test and we hope people will like it and start using it.
We will offer tools to copy existing community content into the new system and will probably do a lot of this automatically to make adoption easier for you. And I emphasise this is copying not migrating so the content is in both systems, it will still be in the old system for use.
I recognise there is uncertainty and I can’t provide precise answers to every question because it is still a long time away, but I would ask you to approach it with a positive mindset, this is a very long overdue investment in the community content functionality we want to make because we recognise how valuable it is to the community and our business.
I don’t agree. Your vision seems to only care about beginners and perhaps intermediates, who aims at being generally conversational in the target language. It does not cater advanced learners and learners with specific needs, who do want separate courses that serve their needs.
I may want to learn French words from Victor Hugo’s works. I may want to learn Japanese words from some mangas (see TinyCaterpillar’s courses). I may want to learn German words to pass the C1 exam. I may want to learn Spanish words that relate to inorganic chemistry (such a course exists!). How could your “scenarios” possibly serve my needs? Is there going to be a scenario of “French 19th Century Literature Workshop”, or “Spanish Inorganic Chemistry Conference”?
I’ve tried to keep up to date with the situation regarding Mems by reading all these post (some by the team) and I was under the impression that we can save ours for now (but not the ones we use) but they will eventually reappear.
I’ve just re-read ► your link ◄ about them (and you did promise to keep it updated) it gives me the strong impression Mems will go.
I’ve attached an extract rather than the actual text.
The new system will not stop what you want to do.
My comment was about how the user interface will be in the new system. Right now you can be subscribed to many different courses, all with their own streak, their own review counts, with duplicated words between courses you have to ignore manually and you end up with a massive list of courses, it is not an optimal system and is frankly extremely confusing for anyone who hasn’t used it for years.
We believe that a language learner would be better off having all their french content in a single place. Within that you can add “scenarios” (lists of words) you want to learn, these could be made by memrise, by yourself or other users and be of any difficulty.
Also happy new year to you.
That’s because the backend systems were not capable of supporting the function anymore, it was an extremely large query ran over a very large set of database tables that had to be ran live to reflect a user’s latest progress and any edits to courses. It was completely unscalable as user numbers grew.
The new system is being built from the ground up around this central concept of adding words to a language and managing that.
What happens to a users course in a given language? If say someone has a course with 40 levels in it and 3000 words, what is going to happen to it? How would it be integrated into a single language spot as a ‘‘scenario’’. What will happen to users own audio recordings?
Thanks for the response, James. It’s a groundbreaking one, because five years after the removal of auto-ignore, it’s the first time we receive an honest explanation. Over the years, the official reason for the removal was that it didn’t work well with non-Latin scripts and too few people used it! I protested against the removal back in 2016, and I still keep a record of a response written by one of your employees, Ms. Lien Rakuscek:
…There were lots of problems with that feature. It didn’t work properly especially for languages and courses with multiple alphabets such as Chinese/Pinyin, Japanese(Kana, Kanji, Hiragana)/Romaji. Very few people actually used this feature, partly because it isn’t available in the Apps but mainly because the majority of people don’t need such feature. Therefore we can’t justify investing our very scarce resources into something that would only benefit a few people and not necessarily improve the overall quality of our platform.
You see, this is the problem with Memrise that really needs to change. If you have technical problems keeping features (auto-ignore, mems, etc.) alive, why not just say it? Why are you (or your colleagues) obsessed with making up unconvincing excuses (e.g. few people use something) that do not justify the removal at all but only generate outcries? I believe that sincerity is a necessity for genuine communications.
I can’t give you a precise answer on any particular detail because as I said above, it is a long time away and not designed yet.
But i would suggest a level would be mapped to a scenario and I don’t see why audio recordings wouldn’t be copied as well.
Those responses are also true, the old system probably won’t have worked as well for such languages. So much we would have had a debate about whether we should spend the time to make it more reliable and how much time and money that would cost to do, how much the existing system cost to maintain and how much it is used. And more importantly what else we could do with the time, we only have so much developer time and we try and spend it in the way that will provide the most value to the most users.
I don’t know the details of the decision as it was 3 years before I joined the company but I asked a backend developer about this a year ago and he told me it was a non-scalable and costly process hence what I said, but that’s his area of concern, he wouldn’t know much about how well it worked for other languages but I’m sure what Lien said was true.
OK. That makes sense. I like your way of communicating. It’s relatively clear and effective. But still, a good explanation should be complete. If you have technical reasons, you need to include them in your explanation to make it complete (and thus convincing). My point remains that the original explanations for the removals of auto-ignore and mems are incomplete and unconvincing. And it would not be true that “the majority of people don’t need such feature” if you see the importance to reintroduce it in the new system.
I’d just like to chime in and agree with everybody who is complaining about removing mems.
Depending on the course, I don’t always find mems useful, and sometimes I’d rather not use them, and I usually don’t make them myself, however there are other instances where they are extremely useful.
I study Korean, and I’ve found mems involving hanja to be very helpful in learning how different words are related, etymology, etc. I imagine this is even more useful to anyone learning Japanese or Chinese.
Maybe, giving the user the option to disable them per course, or altogether, would make more sense.
Please, don’t remove mems, and most importantly, and don’t do anything to disturb community-created courses. Memrise is overall good as it is, and while I’m sure there are improvements to be made, these types of major, completely unnecessary changes, as can be seen from this thread, only make users upset.
This particularly change, similar to the 2018 “Decks”, makes Memrise much less useful as a learning tool and reduces the likelihood that current premium users will continue the subscriptions (in my case, two premium subscriptions.)
I don’t know… For someone whose tech skills are below average your scenarios are gonna be one hell of experience. Even for an average user thousands and thousands of mini-courses will look like an endless labyrinth. Dashboards will become a total mess.
If the technical backbone is built robustly then this is a solvable user interface problem. For example Spotify has untold millions of songs but they don’t put them in a list, you can browse them through albums, playlists, radios, mixes, genres and search to find the content relevant to you at that moment.
The new platform and its features will be focussed on what’s needed for language learning because that is Memrise’s core purpose, and non-language courses accounts for less than 1% of lessons.
Non-language will certainly live on for a substantial time on the existing system but I don’t know of any hard decision either way if it will be on the new system.
