The Official Memrise courses for Turkish - where are the mem's?

Official Memrise Courses Turkish
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I am really sad to say so but honestly I was pretty underwhelmed to find the Official course useless compared to the “Hacking Turkish 1” which I tried previously.

So here’s the thing, I am writing this because I care. I rarely participate in forums at all, but I felt an urge to express my thoughts hoping to make a change.

Some months ago I when I first started learning Turkish there wasn’t any official Memrise course for Turkish. So I went with the ‘Hacking Turkish 1’.

I was pretty impressed with the hacking series even though it was made by a member and not official.

Why was I impressed?
Because THE #1 IDEA behind Memrise and what makes it unique over other apps like Duolingo is the MEMS! That’s THE DIFFERENCE that makes all the difference in the learning experience.

The mems are what makes it easy to learn a new word. These mems, these ‘stupid’ (but not stupid at all!) mems is what makes a foreign word so easy to remember.

Example : If you study the word “göreceksin” and the mem shows you a woman rejecting a man and the text shows you 'YOU WILL SEE that girls reject him" (göreceksin) this is a brilliant way to associate the word göreceksin with “you will see”.

The mem which is the emblem of the Memrise method is what makes this and all that there words so easy to learn.
The hacking Turkish 1 contained a ton of very creative images and texts creating memorable mems that are fantastic!

I decided to stop the hacking series because of just one flow, the course was incomplete In a sense that mid course the Speed Learning word no longer get worked as it said missing from this stage of something like that. The person who built the course didn’t make the option of speed learning (where you have just a few seconds to answer the quizzes) work mid course. And that’s a shame because speed recalling words is important part of the learning process.

So a few days ago I visited again the app and found that now Memrise have official Turkish course something that they didn’t have 8 or so months ago. I was so thrilled to start it.

But then I got the great disappointment. The mems for the official course are bad to the post not of being unusable and doesn’t help at all with most of the words you are trying to learn. And to invent my own mems for each and every word would be crazy, inefficient and time consuming.

I can’t believe no body mentioned this. The lack of good mems in the Official course is what makes the course ineffective and the hacking series on the other hand totally awesome!

Can the person who created the Hacking Turkish 1 etc… Fix the course so that the speed recalling of words works not just for the very few lessons but only for the more advanced lessons? That would have been the holly grail.

Frankly, at the moment comparing the Official Turkish courses that Memrise relatively recently added vs. Using Duolingo, I find doulingo a better experience, only because THE BEST FEATURE of having good memorable mems are non existent from the official Turkish Memrise course.

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The mems are mostly user-created. If everyone thinks like that there would be no mems at all. If you don’t see a good mem, make it. Official Turkish courses are new with a new database. People who are using them have created all the mems. I haven’t seen a one made by memrise (In any official courses I’m taking)

Briefly, if you want things to get better, you have to become better and do smth about it.

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What makes Memrise is its community of Mems creating individuals. A new course will be poor.

It needs to become rich thanks to everyone’s contribution. Don’t hesitate to participate get "mems"ing :slight_smile:

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I have some sympathy with your view @Text. See my post from 2 days ago in this other topic: [Feature request] encourage / force mem creation

I encourage people to make mems but PLEASE not ‘spammy’ ones.They just clog up the site and are no help to anyone who is trying to learn. I think the problem with the newly created Memrise language courses is that they have started a new database for each one, which means that they don’t ‘pull up’ the mems that have already been created for items that appear in older courses. I have asked the Memrise Team if that is the case and, if so, whether something can be done about it but, as yet, have had no reply. I’m not optimistic about finding a solution.

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Exactly, if Memrise could import mems from the m current courses that would
be awesome.

I totally understand the point that new courses don’t have much
contribution of mems yet. I know these are user created. I understand that.

Still, bottom line, I came to learn a new language right? And I just
rechecked the official Memrise course for Turkish. Sssooo many words have
pretty much USELESS mems which wouldnt help even a tiny bit for a person to
learn the new word.

Most only contain text and explains the chosen word construction. If I
needed that I would have learned a traditional class course.

The Hacking Turkish 1 course on the other hand had terrific mems! The only
downside to it was that in the middle of the course the speed review no
longer worked and that ‘gamification’ of the speed review is tremendously
important in training the brain to quickly recall words.

The whole point is learning through funny texts that make them stuck in
your brain. NOT through mems which are just textbook descriptions of the
word construction. I can’t see how people are missing that super important
element.

The combination of funny and memorable mems WITH visuals is what makes
Memrise AWESOME.

That’s what makes Memrise so DIFFERENT from other learning methods.

Take these two components away and you get almost the same language
learning experience you would get with any other program out there.

And that’s bad because it removes Memrise uniqueness and you are losing
fans of Memrise that way.

I can’t see how that is so overlooked.

Importing good mems from courses who already have them, like the Hacking
Turkish courses should be the first priority of Memrise, not some low
priority task.

It would be great if Ed Cook would personnel read this post l.

I was a paid user up to a few months ago. I spent my time writing my post
of this forum because I care and it would be quite a pitty to see such a
great idea joy being properly implemented. Especially that this is such a
small thing to fix.

Doing very simple sql database queries to get the mems from other courses,
having someone to manually quickly review them and import is just hours to
a few days work for making a permanent awesome Memrise course which is
there for ever.

Cheers

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Different ppl think different. What makes no sense to you may make sense to others.

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My 2 cents …

Memrise has the resource of a lot of great mem’s created over the years and it seems a waste not to be able to use them across courses.

It would improve the the official courses to have ready made good mem’s present IMO.

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@Text I am going to change the title of the thread a little, hope you don’t mind. :sunflower:

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Hi! Thanks a lot for your interest in Memrise courses. I see that you are an avid user of our courses, and follow eagerly.
As the person who created the official Turkish course of Memrise, I can say that our users are making great effort in creating mems and spotting mistakes in the course, which is something wonderful! There should be more and more people who wish to create mems, as you may understand for a native Turkish speaker, that may not be very useful for someone who is learning it.
I am passing your post to Ed, he will read it.
For creating sql database queries, I don’t think it would be feasible as few items would show similarity between language pairs. Not every mem shows similarity to the items in other language pairs.
Please go on learning Turkish, it really doesn’t matter whether it is Hacking Turkish or official Memrise course. Hacking Turkish is a well-prepared one I think, having tried it myself and I appreciate their effort.
Also if you spot missing things, mistakes or things to develop in Turkish course, always share with us.
I hope you enjoy your learning journey in Memrise,
Tuba

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Hi Tuba,

This is so nice of you to respond, I appreciate it.

The hacking Turkish course has excellent mems and corresponding funny
images.

I noticed that when one uses the app, he can only add textual mems, I
didn’t see an option for adding images which kinda make it less appealing.

Further the last time I checked the official Turkish course the mems
weren’t helpful at all. They weren’t ‘mems’ for that matter, just textbook
explanations. I can pick up a Turkish leaning book, that’s not what I need
an app for.

I am sorry to say that, but it was so useless that I abandoned the course
after like 15 minutes into it.

I think it would have been extremely helpful to import mems from courses
such as the hacking Turkish.

The hacking Turkish is good, the only thing was that mid course the speed
word recall test stopped working saying something like ‘is not available
for that course’. And the quick recalling of words is a great feature.

Hopefully the official course will include mems which actually help the
learner. I will try to check it again.

Thanks

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Hello, @Text , currently I am learning Hacking Turkish. And I read your post here. Generally, I agree with you that The Hacking Turkish Series are awesome. But eh… Your post is too long, so I am not sure that I can understand you.

As long as I read, you were trying to compare between Hacking Turkish and Turkish Official (only). Probably, it could be better if you represent your idea about Turkish Official straight forward than only comparing to another.

And can you help the creator to fix for the words that you said that useless or inefficient in Turkish Official?

Well, that’s only a suggestion for you. ^^