Extremely disappointed by this. The new layout is childish, I relied on instant feedback and immediate retesting of the failed word/phrase that when I tried the new layout, my progress slowed considerably.
I also predominantly use community courses. How am I supposed to continue if these are removed?
Can’t believe I actually paid for this now. I won’t be renewing.
Is there anyway to incorporate typing in the phrases in ‘Learn New Words’? This is a major part of what helps me to learn them and now only having multiple choice or listening is too easy… it’s disappointing that I can’t now challenge myself
Well, reading through this extensive shit-storm (being well deserved!), one positive thing to note is the count of users who obviously took the time to create a forum user account just to be able to comment. Also true for users who haven’t visited the forum in a very long time. But I suppose recent research shows that this is just another fringe group.
But seriously: I know of absolutely no company who so very desperately tries to rip their (formerly great) product apart. You guys definitely need a new adviser (if there is one), a product manager who knows what (s)he’s doing, research tools that are actually applied and exploited by people who aren’t biased and know how to do proper research. The way it is now is beyond ridiculous.
I thought Decks was where you had hit rock bottom, but this one has a very good chance to top that.
Kudos again, very well done, be proud of yourselves!
Exactly. After trying to review stuff in the new interface, these two things feel so infuriating.
Hello.
I don’t want to use cards with words during “Classic Review”. I want only to type words on keyboard because it’s the only way to remember words for me. Picking up right words on cards doesn’t help me. =(((
So I’ll be forced to use another platform if you remove that option to review words in “classic review” mode.
Thanks if you listen.
Memrise developers, all these problems are because you don’t care about developing a learning tool and putting money interests above users interests. You can make more customization, allow users to chose the way they want to learn (all-typing or flashcards only, mems or no mems, etc), improve community courses editing tool.
But nope, you’ll tear everything apart, make nonsensical design changes nobody asked for, promote official courses with hundreds of errors, charge us two times more, lose your core audience, and then say that you don’t have resourses to build anything. This is a scenario you see there every time.
What happened to difficult words ? Why can’t I choose after a lesson which words I would like to add to the difficult words list ?
Please, leave at least the difficult words tool as it was. This is one of the main reasons for my subscription. I didn’t like at all what you did with it, and I won’t renew my premium if you change it. I want to choose which words I want to repeat as difficult and remove them from this list only when I feel that I’ve learned them.
It seems that memrise now is chosing which words I find difficult … I added a few words to the difficult words list during a lesson, practiced one time, and then they disappeared … Who said that practicing one time is enough ?
I really liked how I could choose the words that I wanted to repeat with the difficult words tool … and now … if you’re gonna change it there’s no reason for me to use memrise anymore. Sadly I already paid for the annual subscription.
There is no real reason to delete them.
The server side support you’re saving now is minimal, and if you want to make it more appealing to get new people coming, you could live a switch in the settings so anyone that wants it can activate it.
This can be for you the fall of many old users that found them essential (they are great and but not easy to make, but the more we use it the more we learn)
I just tried the beta version for the first time. The UI is a little disconcerting but the main problem is the lack of typing available when learning words. For me it’s the best way to learn - as other users have said, it’s not as though you get tapping test prompts when trying to communicate in real life situations! I’m learning Greek through a community course I’ve made myself and that has a number of letters/diphthongs that share the same sounds, but the spelling makes a difference to the meaning. It’s not an optional extra but fundamental to learning the language.
I’ve always held off taking out a subscription here because the periodic enhancements are always anything but. It seems like I’ve made the right decision. I don’t use mems myself, but I don’t agree with taking away that feature for others. Everyone learns in a different way, a concept that Memrise initially recognised and embraced, and other platforms such as Duolingo do not seem to grasp at all. Therefore you’re actually removing your USP, which is never a good long-term move. I wonder whether you plan to change the name too… Not that I will be around to care - I’ll be leaving when the beta version becomes mandatory.
I’m not sure how memes could ever make the site less appealing for new people.
They already were so unnoticeable, that if you don’t know where to look in advance, the chances are you don’t get to know about the meme’s existence at all.
The feature is so much buried down, no wonder that according to “recent research” “the majority of learners that have access to them do not use them”.
Rather than removing the memes, the right thing to do would be to work on their accessibility and promote them instead.
This is both devestating and idiotic.
The most important aspects of Memrise were type-only reviews and the use of mems. The bastardised-remnants-of-Memrise is unusable for either learning new vocabulary or reveiwing. I feel that after 10 years I now have no chocie but to give up completely on Memrise and, perhaps,
on language learning in general.
Don’t give up on language learning in general; it’s a fantastic skill for personal growth, learning about new cultures, traveling, job opportunity, etc. etc. etc. If you must, just learn a standalone desktop program, like Anki or similar, such that no one can force updates on you as is the case with web-based apps.
That said, the great part about Memrise vs. other such programs is its low level of skill required to get started, yet incredible level of customization. That, and the community interaction involved with community courses, leaderboards, (edit because I forgot the obvious: MEMS), etc. Additionally, Memrise has a minimalist interface which manages to look sleek and simplistic and mature, yet simultaneously aesthetically pleasing to look at and friendly in atmosphere. Memrise (as a website and app, perhaps not as a company) generally treats its users as if they are intelligent adults but while still having the ability to draw in children that likewise have an interest in learning languages, etc. Other apps (Duolingo, etc) sometime seem to lean too much into being inviting to children, which can potentially alienate their older users in the process.
Anki has the customization but also a huge learning curve (or at least it seems that way to me), little community interaction outside of downloading user-made decks, and (to me, at least) a very boring interface. This update throws all of that customization out the window and makes it so Memrise isn’t much better than Duolingo (which has community interaction but low customizability and a generally somewhat childish interface. That said, I use Duolingo sometimes), or even Quizlet or another static flashcard-app.
I’ve been on the fence about buying a yearly membership for a while now, but have yet to do so, because it seems as though large aspects of the site can be changed at a moment’s notice and I might not get my money’s worth. This isn’t even the first bad decision (Anyone remember Ziggy or Decks…? …With the former giving Memrise far too much of the childish feeling I mentioned earlier and the latter decreasing community interaction as also mentioned earlier). However, those were ultimately reversed and I’m confident this can be tweaked back to a level the community is generally comfortable with… if the site management cares to do so. If it’s fixed by the end of the year (when the changes are supposed to become permanent), maybe I’ll buy a yearly membership. If not, I’ll likely move on to another site, after nearly a decade of use of Memrise.
To remove the mems is so silly, I am at a loss for words! How are you supposed f.e. to learn Kanji without mems? It seems, the people at memrise never use their own software, or else they would not do such things.
I don’t even think that they put monetization above user interests. It’s very much worse than that: they seem to be actively attempting to tear their product apart, making completely and utterly irrational decisions, as if they wanted to upset as many users as possible.
Any reasonable company, even if they were wanting to go through major changes, would (still) do their best to fix things that cause problems or that carry a chance of driving away paying users, of receiving bad reviews, the such.
A reasonable acting company would closely listen to complaints, to suggestions for improvement or any signs that groups with certain interests would give which would either result in profit loss or potential profit gain.
Memrise seems to do the very opposite.
And they have done so numerous times in the past ~4y which is how long I have been a paying customer (well, I bought the lifetime sub, so I got away cheaply, but that’s not all too relevant here).
It’s only because even though they repeatedly “circumcised” their product (and got away with it every time), it still is one of the best (vocab-) learning tools around. It was much better than everything else I tried out (and every time they do this I look around thoroughly!) despite new bugs and/or disappeared features, which is why I continued to stick with it.
But even the highest pile of advantages gets lower every time you take one away. There isn’t much left anymore and sooner or later it’ll probably mean that you have to bid your farewell, as sad and disappointing as it might be.
Honestly I don’t understand it. I’d imagine getting rid of mems (and perhaps next community courses) could perhaps be motivated by freeing up server space which would save a little money I guess. Plus in the years I’ve used memrise the course creation pages has always been clunky and at least as much as I can remember it hasn’t really been updated/improved. The functionality hasn’t been a priority to maintain for a good while.
One other benefit of stripping back features means less code to maintain, making updates and debugging a fair bit easier on their end. Idk if you’ve used Duolingo but it’s like when a while ago they got rid of the timed practice feature citing “multiple bugs that needed sorting out” which happened a whileeee back. And guess what it’s still not back and probably won’t ever come back.
Memrise seem to be trying to zero in their target consumers to be children. Cutting back features which won’t be as useful to little kids which they are hoping to become a larger portion of their client base would make more financial sense I guess. The majority of kids would be using it for school so most would be doing courses set by teachers rather than personal study. So smaller proportion of their clientele would be the passionate types to bother making mems or community courses.
I don’t know why they’d think this move would be a good idea though. A younger client base is going to be a lot more transient who would be focused on getting their grades at school then never opening it back up again. It would make maintaining client numbers stable much more unstable because it requires the new influx of kids each year - and therefore needing teachers to enjoy using memrise year on year which seems… sketchy with how things are going atm. I would assume fostering a passionate adult client base would be a much more stable marketing method but I’ll be the first to admit I’m hardly super informed on how the marketing side works.
I wonder what is going on at Memrise HQ. I did a bit of digging and they listed a job opening for a new Lead Digital Product Designer 4 months ago which still hasn’t been closed which explains a lot lmao. If anyone has any UI or UX experience reading this in London who thinks they could sort this mess out maybe you could apply! You could at least make new UI less ugly. It would be funny to see a disgruntled former user-turned employee try to get on board and sort this disaster out lol.
I don’t support this decision; such a disappointment 
I honestly feel like I’m developing attachment issues with language apps. Duolingo started pushing plus and ads way too hard and stripped off most of the functionalities I used so I haven’t used it in a long while. And now this is happening.
Guess this is the push I needed to get a better grip on Java so I can make my own app and actually have some stability lol.
My guess is that they want to get rid of the Community courses eventually and keep only their courses. This was here already couple of years back and by removing mems, they take away one huge incentive to use Community-created courses.