I believe the course would improve if it dropped teaching expressions like “WOW” (нифига себе!) , “No way!” (ни в коем случае!) or “Are you kidding?!” (Да ладно!) early on… I think these just occupy mental bandwidth while you are trying to learn the basics like “My name is…” or even a simple “Greetings” which can get complicated in Russian 
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I agree, those are tricky because Memrise obviously expects a very specific answer for these rather broad phrases. There are other examples later in the course, where IMO the translation is either oddly specific or not very literal. Examples:
- посоветуйте хороший ресторан ; could you recommend a nice restaurant? (imperative vs. conditional)
- девушка, вы не могли бы мне помочь? ; excuse me, could you please help me? (the English version is gender-neutral, the russian uses “girl”)
- мой дядя себе на уме ; my uncle plays his cards close to his chest (this one might be correct but I must say that I wasn’t very familiar with the English idiom here. Maybe “my uncle keeps to himself” or something like that?)
- гулять ; to go out (and more generally all movement verbs. Now admittedly that’s a very tricky part of Russian and doesn’t fit the Memrise format very well, but I find that the course does a very poor job of explaining the difference between, say, гулять and выходить).
Basically for many of these sentences I end up memorizing some somewhat contrived Memrize translation instead of what I’d more naturally use.
I also wish that both perfective and imperfective versions be accepted when relevant, even if Memrise decides to only teach one first for simplicity (which is probably a good idea). Being marked wrong because you said that “to open” is открывать instead of открыть is frankly frustrating.
Overall it’s a rather large improvement over the previous version course though, so kudos for that.
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This sort of thing shakes my confidence in the lessons completely. There have been a number of other phrases that puzzled me, but this one is over-the-top.
There is never a female attendant shown in the video clip. It is hard for me to believe that people would say this were it a male attendant being addressed. We are led to believe that девушка equates to “excuse me”. Also, there is no explanation of the difference between девушка and девочка, or when one or the other should be used. They shortly after it simply asked for “Girl”, and to test it I replied “девочка” and it was counted wrong.
It really destroys my confidence that my time with this is leading to my being able to functionally use the language.
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