I’m not convinced about the advantages of going “Pro” and I was wondering if someone could help me understand them to see if I’m maybe miss-understanding them.
I’m learning simplified Chinese and I’ve been using the free version for a long time now, learned almost 2000 words but the pro features don’t really convince me as it seems more like some nice marketing terms rather than stuff that really helps you advance faster and learn better…
“Personalised learning rhythm” So I’m getting a graph that tells me when I usually learn?
“Pro scientists for PRO learners” Great, you’ve teamed up with people from fancy schools, how thorough was the research or work you did with them, how will going pro give me the advantage of the work you’ve done with them? I’m assuming even though it’s listed as a pro benefit, that this great research has already been applied to the free version as well?
I get to practice dificult words, ok this might be helpful
But these 3 are not convincing me to pay 59$?! a year for a slight improvement…
All features other than difficult words are useless. I’ve been using pro for a year now but the difficult words feature helps enough to make it worth it… sort of.
Hi, pro user here.
I just wanted to have some statistics, as statistics always motivate me. Of course the listening exercises, the difficult words and the speed review is appreciated as well. Now I’m completely honest and also say this: Knowing that I paid for it makes me study more as well. I know how stupid this looks…
Hope that helped.
Cheers
Thought the speed review is available to me as well, as a free user…
What statistics does it show?
Do you often do the difficult words exersises? And how accurate do you find the difficult word exersises list to be? As in, are the words in there mostly difficult, all difficult, half half or mostly not difficult?
Regarding statistics, you great a breakdown of time spent on different courses, your “learning history” (days you’ve studied, and how many tasks you studied) for the past year, and a graph showing the times and day you do the most of your study.
The difficult word exercises aren’t extra words in a course that are hard, but a selection of words you’ve struggled with in a course which you can review independently of words you get correct more often. This lets you focus on the words you do poorly at, so hopefully you can improve them faster.
I am trying pro now and I quite like the Meet the Natives feature and the listening skills. I have done coursework on sites with robot voices and then tested listening skills and was surprised at how detrimental some of the fake voices are. Having real voices is helpful. I’ve learned a lot more about the sound of words with the real voices. The choices of Natives are fun and bring personality to the courses.
Will I renew and pay for it? Probably not. My problem with Pro isn’t the price, it’s the fact that it doesn’t come with customer service and the app is buggy. When I put bug reports here I generally haven’t gotten help and when I have it is like pulling teeth. In the end I was left feeling like they should have paid me for my time.
When my renewal time comes up I will just switch to youtube, hellotalk and movies for the listening skills.
As for the difficult words feature I don’t really find it helpful. I physically write down words that are difficult for me - with a pen and paper. That is extremely more helpful to me then doing more computer/phone exercises.
(Sorry for poor writing tonight - it’s been a long day)
Thanks for the insightful reply, I hope memrise reads this post to help them better their premium service, from what I’ve read so far it’s not at all worth the 59$ a year.
One of the features that makes the difficult words list useful is the ability to manually add words to it at the end of a review session (if you’re using the website… not sure about the app). Memrise will add words automatically if you miss them, and then remove them automatically after you’ve successfully reviewed them a couple times. Words that you add manually stay on the list until you manually remove them. I find it very useful to add words manually to the DW list, do a DW review a couple times per week, and after the review, manually remove the words that I feel I finally know.
I use the app version mostly and I add words to difficult words very often. --If I don’t remember the word without looking at given letters, it goes to DW right that moment …(not after the session)
I’m a happy pro member for years now and will be in the future, if the price remains under 30 a year.
I find it more useful to think of the value of the Pro membership more in terms of what I would lose rather than what I gain.
Many of us get a tremendous amount of pleasure, knowledge, self-development etc from this site and if it were to disappear for any reason, I’m sure that many would feel its loss most keenly.
Accordingly, by paying for a Pro membership I am doing my little bit to help ensure that the site remains financially viable as a business and therefore stays around for all of us to enjoy.
I hope this different perspective helps how you view the value of the Pro membership.
Bought the pro membership after one of the sale pop-ups came up, and figured it was so cheap that I could get it to show appreciation. Haven’t seen anything of value from it yet, so very unlikely to renew it.
Difficult words is a terrible feature. Maybe it works if you assign difficult words manually, but for me I feel like it mainly gets filled up with long phrases with a typo in it somewhere.
Meet the natives seem fairly cool, but as far as I can tell in the Chinese course it is only used when learning words and only gives a MCQ. That is a severe under-utilisation, as it is hardly a strain on your listening skills when it could only be five words/phrases, and you pick out of four most of which are invalid alternatives because they are not one of the five new words/phrases. Real shame considering that the videos themselves are good with loads of different native speakers.
That’s a nice way of looking at it, unfortunately I am taking Chinese classes in Shanghai, while looking for a job, which is putting a strain on my budget and paying for another monthly subscription without getting any real benefits isn’t an option right now. I hope however that Memrise reads this topic and gets some ideas from where their users are lacking the motivation to buy into their pro membership so that they can improve their services!
For me it gets filled up with stuff I know because the tile exercises sometimes has tiles partially covered by the enter button and no amount of scrolling uncovers it.
I’m coming up to renewal, and really don’t think I will pay for Pro again. My main reason is the really appalling customer service. I have written emails which have gone totally unanswered, which just isn’t good enough for people paying the amount of money Pro asks.
You have to think about it from Memrise’s perspective:
without revenue, investors will leave and Memrise would have to shut down
Having lots of features in Pro would disappoint people on Free with a tiny featureset
Having too few would result in too little revenue and people complaining Pro has too few features
It would be awesome if Memrise rewarded course and mem creators with free Pro- perhaps the mems could be incorporated into the apps themselves. That would frame Pro in a better way.
Really the main good feature in Pro is difficult words, but it’s been a phenomenal help that justifies the cost entirely. For the latest course I started, I’ve been grinding down my difficult words every day after my main review sessions and it’s been a tremendous help for getting them down, to the point that I’m actually contemplating restarting some of my older courses to do them this way once I’m done learning this new course. The other useful thing is the ability to download courses on the app version, which I found very helpful for going on trips.
