I love how they just don’t even give a shit enough to respond anymore. Are they trying to alienate their customers?
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I cancelled my pro membership just now, screw it. I am sick of them only popping in to take features away or be rude about people objecting to them taking features away. It’s one thing to just be constantly gutting your website, it’s another to be a-holes about it. Honestly, I don’t want to give them my money anymore because…they’re rude. 
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I suggest you move to anki as soon as possible. I transferred all my studies there as soon as “the beta” got rolled out, and I didn’t have a moment of regret since then.
Anki is completely customizable, so you are free to add as many comments and mems to the flashcards as you need. It is not hard to reproduce a lot of memrise features either (like typing tests, autograding answers, progress bar, timer, audio playbutton… I can provide some hints on how to make those if anyone is interested). You can even set up anki to generate audio on the fly, if the original data does not include one, or create a flashcard in 1 click from any data on the web.
The thing I am particularly fond of at the moment is that you can set it up to have the best of the two worlds in so many aspects:
- you can have a timer to pressure you to review words more efficiently, but also decide yourself in each case if you wish to continue to try to remember a word after the timer had ran out (and still get it graded correct with a small penalty if succeeded)
- you can have your answers graded automatically, but still keep the power to correct a grade if needed - in case you made a silly typo or wrote a valid synonym, not accounted for in the card itself (and you can also choose to add it as a possible answer to the card right away)
- you can have all the tests set up as typing tests, but still decide to review a word just by showing an answer and telling anki yourself whether you got it right (in case typing is not an option at the moment, like when reviewing on the phone).
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@Eltaurus I would definitely be interested in a post detailing how you’ve optimized Anki for your experience. I’d be especially interested in hearing about some of the add-ons that you’ve evaluated. It would also be good to know how you’ve configured Anki to grade answers automatically. Thanks!
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Thanks, once I am finished with the course I am here, I will move and explore Anki. Already unsubscribed my payment to Memrise; I’ve been a paying member since 2016 too.
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I’m not sure such post on this forum wouldn’t be considered a violation, as the topic is not relevant to Memrise at all. Maybe we should start a private discussion and invite others who are interested? Or just move to Anki community forum?
This is done by simply using the “auto rate typed answer” addon (to make a card with a typing question you just need to put {{type::your_question_field}) on the front side of the card).
In short, the other ones I decided on using are
- AnkiConnect – for the creation of cards from a web browser with Yomichan
- AwesomeTTS – for using text to speech services in Anki
- Customize Keyboard Shortcuts – for obvious reasons
- Advanced Copy Fields – to facilitate the database management
- Review Heatmap, reviewer_progress_bar (should be installed manually from GitHub to work), and Enhance main window – for adding extra features to the interface
And if you want to go deeper into modifying Anki appearance yourself, “AnkiWebView” and “HTML Window source” come in very handy
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This this this this this!
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I also made my own addon for making Anki decks look more like Memrise courses:
So if anybody wants to look at it, I would appreciate any feedback
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Man, I really wish I could use the more customizable Anki, but I am on a work computer and can’t install open source software. 
I have AnkiApp (not sure if that’s even the same company), though, and it’s not bad at all.
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More specifically, AnkiApp (whoever/whatever/wherever it is) doesn’t treat me like I’m garbage and not even worth their time like the staff at Memrise have, historically speaking. It’s really pretty astonishing just how incredibly dismissive they are to their customers, almost like they have some awesome insurance or something and literally want to tank their company for the payout.*
I directly asked @MemriseSupport for a simple update about notes/mems TEN days ago, and they can’t even be bothered to say “we’ll look into that.” Never mind that they don’t care about my membership being cancelled over this blatant f-you, I mean, just think about how it looks. I’ve witnessed websites with a deathdrive before, but never like this.
*not actually saying I believe this
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Maybe I’m just stupid, but is there a way if I create my own course to display images that i have added to the course on ios even if thats NOT the collum that is quizzed?
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If there is a way to do this, I would also like to know. Literally any way to add mnemonics.
haha caught me there, literally what I’m trying to do. I can see them on web, but not on mobile. thats the only hurdle atm.
small example:
Anki also has a web version, so you can use it from your browser without installing anything.
Although I haven’t tried it myself yet and don’t know if it functions in the same way as the desktop version, considering that the desktop Anki under the hood is just a bunch of html-pages, I would expect that these two versions have a lot in common.
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If anybody know how I can display the mnemonic on the iOS App (it’s just an image collum) aswell as Kana/english or Kana/Kanji - I would be delighted. At this moment this just works if the Image itself is quizzed.
Which kind of works if its just the kanji that are quizzed because its displayed, but not in any other form, like when learning a new word and i need to see kana and english
Oh man I don’t know where to start. I made my memrise account 10 years ago and have had spurts of using it A LOT and then also lengthy periods of time not using it as life happened and I had other things to focus on. I always remembered it, though, and always had the intention to come back when life quietens down a bit.
So this week, life quietened down a bit and I logged back in to my account to pick up some of my courses. Of course everything looked different, that doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t mind a different look. Change is often a good thing. After a few days I was looking for mems as I still remember some of the ones I used and I was wondering where in this new memrise interface they were hiding. Through this I found out about the changes made in 2017 where mems were originally removed, then brought back, and then about the changes made at the end of 2021. The fact that I logged in in this 6 month period where memes can allegedly still be downloaded is sheer luck.
Admittedly, I only read part of this lengthy thread, but from what I have gathered so far, I do not understand the justifications for removing mems. They are the feature that set this platform apart from so many others that are simply an electronic version of flashcards. Mems are what made me learn so much more and better and more efficiently. So among all the possible good changes, removing mems is in (judging by previous comments not only) my opinion the worst possible change you could make.
I just paid for a year’s membership. It is not a huge amount of money, but on a student budget, it was a consideration whether to spend it on this app, or on food or rent. I understand that it costs money to maintain a website, and the staff behind it, but without mems as a part of memrise, it’s not worth spending money on it. I’m deeply disappointed, I feel alienated as a user of memrise for a decade, and I will most certainly not renew my membership if this change stays as it is. Just my 2 cents on this topic…
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I’m going to come back to memise periodically until mems are restored. And I refuse to use any feature or pay until that happens. Why is it that mems are still available but you make it nearly impossible to view mems freely?
You have to 1. Get a word wrong in a lesson 2. Go and review that word manually 3. Then push a button to view mems
For the love of god just listen to your user base.
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This has been a fun week of being subscribed for memrise pro, but after trying some of the new courses to see if they’re worth it, I unfortunately came to the conclusion that they’re not worth it for my needs. Some of the reasons are outlined in the post I’m answering to, and a bit more detail on the specifics follows. I submitted a lot of this as reasons for cancelling the pro membership and requesting a refund, but I thought it might be worth posting it here in case there are other memrise members in the same situation who might find it useful:
Reasons for cancelling my pro membership and requesting a refund:
I have largely been using Memrise for learning Mandarin Chinese as a native German/English speaker and have tried a few different courses, including the ‘new’ ones (Learn Chinese (Simplified) on Memrise - Beginner - Mandarin Chinese 1 - Memrise) that have the grammar, learn with locals, etc. sections in them, some of which are Pro content. After trying it for about a week, I find that the focus of these courses does not sit well with me. It feels like the focus is too much on blind memorisation of pinyin phrases with the characters playing a side role. When characters are introduced, then they are also frequently given without prior introduction of the radicals. As a result, I can no longer derive the characters’ meanings from their composition. The connection between radicals that make up a character and the meaning is of course not always straightforward, but this is where mems are/were the shining stars. They allowed creativity, and a little story for many a complex character helped making it easier to remember it. The fact that this creativity was crowdsourced made it even better.
While mems are/were a free, community curated resource and I would really expect them to be free, I might begrudgingly pay for a pro membership if it means that this is the only way I can access them. I really suggest that the creators of the mems should then be asked for permission, but this is an entirely different can of worms.
In summary:
The new course(s) are not worth paying for. The live recordings are a nice touch, but they do in no way make up for the other things that have been removed. The focus is too much on memorising pinyin phrases, often without context, and with characters being thrown in as a token. The teaching methodology is less innovative than it was at memrise’s inception (from my limited insight as teaching EFL for two years).
Suggestions for improvement:
- I like the learn with locals snippets. I’m sure they are a lot of work to make and require a good amount of space to host on a server. If you can, please do keep them, but integrate them better with the rest of the course. I think the best-of-both-worlds solution would be a combination between the ‘new’ Mandarin Chinese courses and @BenWhately’s ‘old’ HSK courses (e.g. HSK level 1 - Introductory Mandarin (wi… - by BenWhately - Memrise). This would ideally lead to a course that introduces characters from first principles (as done in the HSK courses), but then goes on to using them in a conversational context (as done in the new Mandarin Chinese courses), using characters as the primary mode of communication, and pinyin second.
- I really like that you introduced some introductory grammar/syntax sections. Perhaps they should also come up when reviewing words to refresh the memory. Overall, this is probably my favourite ‘new’ feature, and I would like to see more of it.
- I had some trouble with using a course both through the web interface and the app. E.g. when removing already learned words in a course through the web interface, this is not updated in the app, and I’m still asked to review them as if I had learned them.
And last but not least:
- Please leave the mems alone. Keep them as a feature, and also make them appear on screen in both, desktop and app version. One of the reasons cited in the decision to remove mems was that they are not used much. Considering how convoluted it is to access them in the app (and I would assume that these days the app is far more commonly used than the desktop version), I am not surprised that they are not used as frequently. (See the post after this one to get an idea on how to access memes at the time of this post)
Discussing:
This is bit of a longer blurb, and I can only hope that this will be read by someone on the @MemriseSupport team. If so, and if you think that this feedback is valuable and/or useful in any way, please do not hesitate to get in touch below or via the email address on my account to discuss. At the end of the day, memrise has made a profound change on my language education, and I would like to continue supporting it if I can. As things are right now, support from me will not come financially, though.
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Mems back in the web interface please!
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Yeah 
really want that
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