Hello,
I like the memrise system and I recommend it to everyone, but I gotta say I don’t think the website (and the forum) are user friendly and I can’t find instructions about anything, so here are my current HOW TO questions:
1 - I have some friends I want to follow - how do I search for them?
2 - how do mems work? I’ve done some but they never show up. I’m I just supposed to study them in my profile, that’s it?
3 - how does the point system work? (sometimes I get lots of points and sometimes I don’t - is there a chart I could look at, out of curiosity?) and how many levels are there?
Are you using the web version or the app? From the website, you can access the Knowledge Base via the “FAQ and Help” link which can be found at the foot of most pages. Heres a quick link: http://feedback.memrise.com/knowledgebase/
It works differently for ‘official’ Memrise-created courses and for the ‘user-created’ courses. In the first case, you can create your own mem for a particular word and you should then see it whenever you get that word wrong during a review. In the second case, you should also see and be able to select mems already created by other users. Where you give a wrong answer during a review, the relevant mem should also be accessible via the summary page you see at the end of a review session. The system was changed a little while ago and you can find discussion about it if you enter “mems” in the forum search tool. The Knowledge Base piece on Mems is here: http://feedback.memrise.com/knowledgebase/topics/77642-mems
There is no official explanation of the points system. It depends on whether you are learning new words or reviewing old ones. Then there are speed and accuracy bonuses. The best I can advise is to look at the summary page which displays at the end of each session and you will be able to work it out.
Hope this helps. Come back if you have other questions.
The max score for one correct answer is 150. If you fail a word, you’ll then get it again later in the same session, but then the score will be lower (which is reasonable, you should get fewer points total because you didn’t know the answer the first time).
After you’ve answered a word correctly, it’ll be a while before you’re asked for that word again. If you fail the word, it’ll be a shorter while before you see it again. So when you see it again after failing, you’ll also get fewer points (perhaps 134, or less) - because you should still get fewer points for failing than for passing. For example, if you could get 2x 100 points for answering correctly after you’d failed a word, but only 150 for answering correctly the first time, people would want to fail words to score more points. So sometimes you’ll perhaps only get 65 points for a correct answer (I don’t remember if there’s anything lower than 65). If you always answer everything correctly every time, you should get 150 every time.
In addition to the points you get for each word, there is then a time bonus and an accuracy bonus that gets added at the end of each session. There are some patterns to the bonuses too - I don’t remember them, but if you pay attention, you can work it out. I think it’s something like 20 points per word for 100% accuracy, and then it drops rapidly (I think 10 points per word at ninety-something percent - but that’s from memory, so it’s probably wrong ;)). The speed bonus is max 5 points per word I think, so for a 5 word review session, the maximum total is 875. 5x150 + 5x20 + 5x5 = 750 + 100 + 25.