I am using Memrise to learn French. I do think Memrise is a great tool, but there are some things that really annoy me. Most of this has either to do with the lack of options to customize your own learning experience:
1 ) Why is “my difficult words” a PRO feature? This should really be a basic feature per my opinion.
2 ) A feature that should be a PRO feature is my ability to go to any course that I attend and make my own customization to the cards there (as in Anki), in order to improve my learning experience (that way I would at-least be paying for an extra service and not for the fact that Memrise is withholding information from me like in point number 1. Currently all you can do is classify a word as hard, ignore it and add a meme). How would this work?:
a ) Did you ever want to change the English meaning of a word translating to another word in the language you are learning or vice versa
b )or wanted to make an alternative word (synonym) an acceptable interpretation of the word
c )or add your own totally new words to the existing words?
That is how it would work, just that the changes you make would be available only to you (thus you would not be changing the course itself for everyone else).
3 ) The ability to modify the frequency and maximal frequency of watering. Watering is way too frequent for words, in my opinion, in which you have proven a 100% proficiency. Also the fact that it seems that 180 days is the maximal re-watering period is way too short. Sometimes I do not want to ignore the word I know well, but I don’t want to see it for some time to go. I should be able to modify the maximal time myself like in Anki, this should really be easy to implement. I am sure some brains went into the Memrise algorithm but the system as it works implies that all people learn at the same phase.
4 ) After I have watered the plants it would be great to see when will I see the word X again (after you finish the rewatering session you can see the words that you watered).
5 ) Ability to customize my daily goal. For me 20000 is too much, 6000 is too low, 10000-12000 would be prefect for me.
6 ) Dropping the red in speed review and replacing it with a calmer colour would be great.
7 ) An overview of how many words will be due to watering in X time
Hi, I too am learning French and was making a lot of progress before they screwed up the interface. I can see the merit with most of your points though I understand why difficult words is a pro feature; they are a for-profit company, they’ve got to make money, and that is a logical upgrade for the pro version to encourage subscriptions. What it seems you’re really asking for is greater customisation in the app. This is a great idea and others have asked for it. The really sad point is that memrise doesn’t seem to listen to its users. Just take a look at the ‘thoughts on the new layout thread’. Not only are they not encouraging new paying users but they’re risking losing their existing customers but I’ve said all this before. Good luck getting a response let alone change with your suggestions.
Some of that you can do with userscripts (Greasemonkey scripts). I seem to remember that there was one for changing definitions that’s pretty similar to what you want, and you can definitely change the site colours. As an example, here’s how Memrise looks for me:
If you’re using the phone app there’s no helping anything, but it makes life easier on the actual website… I also wish there were a way to extend the maximum time until the next reviewing but there doesn’t seem to be. By the time things get that stretched out I usually end up hitting “ignore” anyway.
I think we need more customization as an incentive for pro users too. I would like to add my own acceptable answers and change the review time of some cards. This does have consequences for Memrise’s leaderboards though, which many users too seriously regard, but it is still important for Memrise’s business strategy. I’m not sure what you could do to make the addition of alternative acceptable answers not a problem for the leaderboards, but for changing the review times, Memrise could simply prevent people from making the reviews more frequent. Another is to scale the points rewarded down based on time, or reward points as if you were doing a review when a card is not actually scheduled.
I use the Android app, so I can’t use the scripts others have written for the web app. The web app doesn’t really work if you’re not using a mainstream operating system, and I’m not using a mainstream operating system.
I don’t like the idea of users changing the cards as they wish. Leave aside that some courses took real work and long time in doing - respect for the creators!
But: in a number of courses I saw alternatives added by curators, with _alt, which were therefore invisible to the “normal user”. What was wrong with those _alts: they were wrong translations, missed the articles in courses explicitely asking for the articles, etc. That/those curator(s) added them for easier advance (? whatever that might be), for getting points without learning…
Please note that I find it perfectly acceptable for Memrise to earn money of the product they offer. I just don’t think the features they offer as PRO are currently worth it. The ability to customize the experience would make it worth it.
I agree @Le_Noir . At this point I am considering not renewing my subscription. They could change that by introducing greater customisation both to the interface and/or the mechanics of learning and reviewing.
I like the idea of being able to make your own notes and maybe even add alternate answers to items in someone else’s course, but only if the changes apply only to the user who made them. I wouldn’t want every course to get opened up like a wiki for anyone to edit freely, as it would inevitably cause issues.
I’d personally be happy just to see the 180 day cap removed. I’ve never understood why there would be a cap in a spaced repetition system to begin with. Surely the human brain can go further than that? It never really bothered me until I accumulated a bunch of items in my rotation. Now I see hundreds of items to review every single day, and removing that cap would really lessen the load.
I like this, too. It seems like it would be simple enough to add to the list that’s already there at the end. I’d rather have that than the buggy ‘streak’ counter, to be honest.
This one’s just a no brainer, in my opinion, and I’m not really sure why Memrise implemented it the way they did. There isn’t even any way of knowing what setting people got their streaks with, so there’s really no advantage to forcing fixed amounts.
Something else I’d love to see. This isn’t official, but someone made a Chrome extenstion here that actually lets you do just that. It’s become extremely helpful for me since I started using it:
Huh, this is interesting! Despite memrise staff getting all huffy about the idea that people might make feature suggestions on this forum, and stating point blank that they do not want such feedback here and will not look at any, there appears to be a category for feedback now, and people are actually making suggestions for memrise here. I wonder what happened? Does memrise want this post to go away? Will they delete it? Will they silently ignore it? Or have they changed their minds and realized how ridiculous they were being?
Do you remember which topic this came up in? I’m all too aware that Memrise hasn’t been very responsive to user feedback for a long while now, but the idea of them flat out saying that they’re not interested in even listening to it is very disheartening.
It came up in the leaders forum which normal users cannot see. When this forum was very new, I was one of the first few people invited, and I was a “leader” so I could participate there. Shortly after that discussion, however, I became a “basic” user without any notice, and nobody from staff has replied to my messages since then, so I don’t know if it was on purpose and they hate me for arguing with them, or a bug or forum quirk that they’re ignoring. Either way, I can no longer see that forum (and I can’t even advance to “Member”, I’m stuck at “Basic”).
The gist of it was that they are not going to create any categories here for feature suggestions or requests from users because they don’t want users to make feature suggestions or requests at all, and they don’t want to read them. Also, all their staff is focused on the web apps only, and they have no intention of improving the web site this year (of course over a year ago they said “for the next few months”, so when they say this year I think they probably mean for many years to come).
However, when I pointed out that a lot of features aren’t specific to web vs. mobile and would benefit all users, they ignored that completely and kept insisting that they don’t have time to work on web features. When I pointed out that course creators have to use the web but facilitating course creators’ work would benefit mobile users, they ignored that too and never addressed it. And when I wrote that mobile users don’t have anywhere else to make feature suggestions, except here on the web, so even if they only want suggestions for the mobile apps they still need to provide mobile users somewhere to talk to each other and propose things… well, they completely ignored that too, and never addressed my point.
Memrise’s attitude is that the web doesn’t matter, the web is a completely separate world from mobile, all feature suggestions from users would only be about the web site and thus irrelevant to mobile, Memrise only wants to work on mobile and not on improving the web site, hence Memrise has no need for suggestions from users and doesn’t want anyone making suggestions, please shut up and go away. But they will fix bugs, as long as they’re just plain bugs.
Thanks for sharing. That is pretty sad to hear. : (
I had a bad feeling when the feedback forum seemed to disappear overnight, without a word from the staff. They’re inevitably going to lose a lot of users with that approach. I’ve never understood why they aren’t more receptive to user opinions and feedback when they’re running a website that relies on their users for their content.
I’m not even that picky about getting new features, personally; I just wish they’d stop taking away/breaking the ones that we already have. I miss the old dashboard and auto-ignore, and though it’s now been nearly three months since it showed up, I’m still hoping that the database order/search issue eventually gets sorted out.
Maybe things will turn around at some point. As long as I’m continuing to use Memrise, I’m going to try to hold out hope for that.
Unfortunately for those of us who care about quality, I don’t know that memrise will even notice a loss of users. They’ve been pursuing mobile users for a couple of years and publicizing their apps, and they keep getting more and more. Mobile users who didn’t visit the web site much mostly never even knew there was a way to give feedback; they just use the app as is. Memrise has certainly been losing some disillusioned users but as long as they keep gaining more and more mobile users, even with very poor quality apps and a buggy service, they can choose to remain in denial without much cost to them (at least as far as they’re aware). Quality will continue to suffer and many old users will continue to be frustrated, but I don’t think Memrise cares about us.
Fast review is only usable for short words or characters. I can’t read 4 sentences/larger words in a few seconds. Time should be dependent on the average length of words.
Define own solutions for certain words, and send request for the course editor to add those words. ( I have completed many courses, and I fail simple words like “mio” and “il mio”, and “tuo” and “il tuo”, because in different courses the answer is different for the same question )
There is a big web security issue which I have reported, (the topic is hidden) and after ~4 months it is still not fixed. (People knowing some web security can find it in 5 minutes)
I would like to see a joint review feature which gets words from all finished courses, and lets you revise all of them in one go. (Or you could specify the number of points)
Maybe a function to do a few days of work in advance, so you don’t lose your streaks if you can’t be online for a day.
I don’t like that they are selling a product yet have no customer service.
I don’t like that I cannot hide Mems in the App.
I don’t like that the app has become useless to me for anything except the Speed Review.
I don’t like that on the website I can’t stop the Auto Advance.
I don’t like that on the website the Unchecking the Autoload Mems button didn’t do shit and I have to go through every single Word/Sentence and go through several steps to get to Go Without A Mem. Over and Over and Over…etc
And I don’t like the constant pop-up to buy Pro when they aren’t willing to make the app worth paying for.
Autoadvance: You answered a question and you automatically get the next
one. (Sometimes you would like to stay to memorize a hard word or note
it down)
@leggi ~ thank you so much for sharing this information about how to stop the auto advance. I tried the “Esc” key this morning and it works great ! It allows you to pause the screen and see what you just learned, before you go on to the next item. What a great feature. I have been using Memrise for a few years now and I had no idea this functionality existed. Thank you SO much for sharing !
