The timer is great for single item tests. However, for grammar the students need to read or listen to lengthy sentences and find equally lengthy reply among 8 other also lengthy replies. As grammar will be become more and more subtle, its not the best when it comes to timed tests, at least ones as short as Memrise is setting.
Please allow course creators the option to disable timer on certain databases, lessons or courses. As it stands now, I either have to tell students to use the mobile which has no timer or find a hack to disable timing and that’s not acceptable. Also, no, the timer does not force students to become better. I’m fairly literate in Japanese and even on the basic courses I’m making, I’m running against the timer. For beginner students, this will be much more difficult and turn them off of learning.
I concur. I’ve encountered this problem and when I do, I end up looking for hint words to click fast without even reading the full sentences, which isn’t the point of the exercise. From a course creator perspective, the other thing that can be done is prompting with the sentence and asking for the particle/particles that are correct. But I agree that it would be best to disable the timer or at least be able to edit the amount of time used for different databases.
I’m of the opinion that the timer is the worst thing on memrise, and removing the timer completely, for all of memrise, is the simplest greatest improvement memrise could make. The timer is just badness all around.
We had lots of very long discussions about this on the old forum, and I know I’m not alone - there are plenty of other memrise users who don’t want the timer, ever. Some memrise users do like the timer. Unfortunately, memrise staff never even commented on any of those discussions as far as I recall, and have never considered a suggestion to give us an option to disable the timer.
Fortunately, someone wrote a browser script several years ago to disable the timer, and it works. I’ve got it installed on all the browsers I use memrise on, and I’ve used memrise with no timer for years now. Every once in a rare while I use memrise on a new browser and get surprised by the timer and remember how awful it is to have the timer and then I look for the script and disable it again. Most recently I just did that on a new work laptop a few months ago.
For Firefox, you first install Greasemonkey. Once you have greasemonkey installed (and restart Firefox), Google for “memrise disable timer firefox” and it’ll take you to a userscripts.org mirror which has the script. Install it, and that’s it.
I know there’s a similar thing for Chrome, and I think there may also be for Safari.
@Charles_Applin35 ~ I agree WHOLEHEARTEDLY ! This issue has been raised several times in the past, and has been one of my biggest bugaboos with Memrise since I began. I see the logic for it with a single word or two, but not when it comes to lengthier phrases or some of the intricacies of grammar; and especially not when a user is trying to learn something in a non-native language (where the brain sometimes needs additional time to translate to the native language first and then back to the non-native language).
Personally, I use vanilla Memrise, with one exception (I downloaded a tampermonkey script to disable the timer ages ago). Ideally, I shouldn’t have had to do that, but it was the only way to turn it off, and my learning with more complex sentences since it has been disabled has dramatically improved. Prior to the disabling, I struggled in a race against the clock with my responses, or simply resorted to the app where I could take my time. Racing against the clock was (and is) an inefficient way to learn.
To further escalate my learning, I also train myself to read ALL of the responses at test time, even when I already know what the correct response should be, as I feel this further reinforces what I believe is in my long term memory. There is no way I could do this if the timer was enabled.
But again, disabling the timer through a script should not be necessary. There should be a setting in Memrise to allow users to do this for themselves. Not just for course creators, but for all users. The app doesn’t have a timer, but not everyone wants to, or has access to, the app. The timer should be an option on the users Settings page on the web version, not a hard-coded part of the program. Thanks for bringing this issue up again ! Hopefully Memrise will act on the request someday.
The app wouldn’t be a solution for me. I use it occassionally, but I specifically avoid learning sentences there because I prefer to type them out instead of just selecting. The app wouldn’t let me do that.
On the other hand, if I type, I do not get to read any other sentences and the timer usually isn’t that much of an issue.
Okay, I don’t know how to withdraw a post, but ignore what I wrote. I shouldn’t try to talk on the phone and type at the same time… Sorry… How does one withdraw a post ??? The edit pencil only took me to the post screen.
I just added that userscript to my browser and it works nicely. Thanks. I’ll definitely put the instruction in some of my courses as the timer can be a huge distraction when learning new grammar/sentences.
I agree, this is a long ongoing issue with the timer. I could not get the greasemonkey addon to work. Maybe I am doing something wrong. I will need to try it again.
I have longer sentences in my courses and I find that you have to “cheat” and just recognize the first word in the sentence and choose it before reading the entire sentence. When you are learning and sounding things out, there just isn’t enough time for the whole sentence.
Not to be redundant, but the with way I like to make courses, this would be really helpful. For me, it’s important to add different inflections of words, but to do this, as sometimes they have the same meaning in English, I add lots of attributes (such as person, case, tense, gender, part of speech, and pronunciation). These can have longer sentences just to read, and there isn’t much time to comprehend which tense or case the word is before having to quickly click an answer. It would really facilitate learning in this way if we could disable the timer.
I wish Memrise would listen to our feedback and allow users to disable the timer. It is become a major issue for me and I’m not enjoying using Memrise as much as I used to.
I’m just getting into longer and longer sentences and am unable to type my replies that fast since I’m using an IME. It makes it almost unusable for the sentences that I have to switch back and forth from hiragana to katakana in my Japanese courses. I’m finding that I have to ignore my longer sentences since I can’t pass them, even though I know them, which defeats the purpose of using Memrise.
Okay, I don’t know if I could be of much assistance, but I’d like you to give disabling the timer another shot. Considering you have downloaded Greasemonkey and the script given by Nukemarine, and don;t know what to do after that.
Open a new tab and type about:addons
You’ll get something like this:
How does one withdraw a post ??? The edit pencil only took me to the post screen.
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