Hi, I’ve been studying the same words for weeks now, when will I get new ones? Getting a little bored.
If you finished the German course, you can do one of 2 things :
- Find other, more advanced courses and learn words from them. There are a ton of user-created courses out there
- Make your own German course and add the words you run into in said course (and then learn them). Combine this with watching movies / reading books and you’re set for life.
Hi Aidan,
I bought pro. Are there just 152 words in the entire German course?
I think so, I’m not studying German at the moment. Regardless there are a lot of user-created courses that go way more in-depth, just have a look here https://www.memrise.com/courses/english/german-2/ . Aside from the official courses, these ones are the most popular https://www.memrise.com/course/46/1000-words-of-elementary-german/
https://www.memrise.com/course/920/5000-german-words-top-87/
Don’t limit yourself only to the official courses, they miss a lot of common words in my opinion.
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Yeah. Go use other courses as well as the official ones as like @LangAddict said. They miss a lot of common words. What kind of German courses do you want to do? Advanced? Or just something like 1000 useful words? or AQA GSCE?
Why don’t you link the concrete URL of which course you are actually taking about and how many words you have already learned and how many are max available?
You can do so when you use the full desktop view on the www.memrise.com web portal; I am not sure about the reduced “mobile compact view” on mobile devices if they render the same desktop informations.
Please don’t show screenshots of the mobile apps.
Using pc mostly, was doing this course https://www.memrise.com/course/1839424/german-1-92/ had no idea there were other courses until Aidan’s reply. Sorted now, thanks all :-)
Just want to learn German, to be able to speak and think in German, so not sure really. Will keep going until I feel proficient, self-directed. Thanks for the tips!
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Hi Susan,
I have been using the PT BR 1-7 (by Memrise) + “Learn PT Basic” (by BenWhately) courses to learn some bits of Portuguese.
Either to refresh, see some phrases in action or to enforce what I had previously learned.
They are nice as they are compact and only a few hundred words (incl. phrases/sentences) long…
As there are ZERO explanations about specific grammar rules for those courses on Memrise (either before or in the lessons itself) you should have studied with a grammar book before/in parallel or you need to use the Duolingo.com English-German / German-English courses in parallel.
The English->German course (from English) provides “tips and notes” on the www.duolingo.com web portal.
It is good to have a mixture.
What other resources are you going to use to learn German?
I had some “Aha” moments when I had actually re-learned specific “grammar skills” on my Duo tree (e.g Imperative, Subjunctives, etc.).
Lingvist.com e.g provides some notes and conjugation and verb tense tables (popup panel) built into the lessons when you have entered the wrong answer (could be further improved, I agree).
IMHO you simply can not use those Memrise courses completely alone.
There might also be specific “grammar” user-created courses on Memrise where you can learn about conjugations, etc.
I have not tried / actively learned them yet.
You can also search on the Memrise web portal for user-created “Duolingo” courses which you would use in parallel to regularly (daily) review specific vocabularlyyou have studied before (either pre-learn or re-learn).
Ich wünsche Dir viel Erfolg auf Deiner Mission und ein gutes Durchhaltevermögen!
Denke daran dass man eine Sprache nicht von heute auf morgen lernen kann (laut FSI ca. 750h: https://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty) und Du schon etwas Geduld mitbringen mußt.
Auf Duolingo hat z.B mein PT BR Baum (Tree) mit 69 Skills ~1 Jahr gedauert; das PT Juni Update hat nun 91 Skills.
Der EN->DE Kurs ist - ähnlich Norwegisch - länger auf Duolingo.
Plane ruhig mal ~1-1,5 Jahre und mit dem Rückwärtsbaum DE->EN (Reverse Tree for more Typing in German) zusammen ~2-2,5 Jahre ein.
Viele Grüße
Do you know the Memrise Hacking series (for true beginners): https://www.memrise.com/course/52750/hacking-german/
This is the related blog: https://blog.memrise.com/2012/12/20/hacking-languages/
Another hacking course: https://www.memrise.com/course/1249877/language-hacking-german-official/
Hi Thomas! why are they called “hacking series”? What is the differences btw the basic german course for beginners? ty!
Which one? Can you include the link?
I enjoyed the “Learn Brazilian PT Basic” (6h, 372 words/sentences) course from BenWhately: Memrise - BenWhately
There are other “Minimum Viable French/Italian” (5h) courses available too.
Other “Learn Basic Spanish/Russian” courses are estimated for 5-6 hours and the “Learn Basic French” one is 3 hours.
“Learn Basic Mandarin Chinese” and “Learn Basic Japanese” is 7 hours.
Where I added one “Learn Basic Italian” course to my learning list with estimated 11 hours.
I also recently added one “Beginner’s Portuguese (BR)” course with 8 hours to my list.
So to me, those rough numbers are good for a start and introduction to a language…I would not choose too big courses in the beginning.
Depending on the available German beginner/Basic courses it may make sense to build one from the English definitions of the other available language courses, if you maybe know 1-3 German native speakers who can help teaching the right vocabulary and make corrections to the given sentences?!
Hi Thomas ! I’m just focusing in German and currently, I’m following this one:
I’m reading in the thread that u recommend to follow other courses outside Memrise (ex, Duolingo) to inforce the learning, right?
This course has 477 “words” (including some phrases/sentences, at least this was the case for me PT BR course).
Well, not everybody has the patience – as a true beginner – to through all the official 1-7 courses from the start.
At least this would be for me the case for several Romance languages, Russian, Japanese/Mandarin, etc.
So the idea was what other user-created “Memrise Decks” courses someone can take in parallel like my “Learn BR PT Basics” not to get too overwhelmed too quickly and to list some shorter ones which are also available.
You must add other resources in parallel if you want to do more serious studying.
Why?
Because Memrise misses - unlike Lingvist - to provide any grammar explanations for introduction user-created courses (maintained by BenWhately) or their official 1-7 course series.
Sometimes you can learn some grammar implicitly.
But for my 8 Portuguese (BR) courses I could clearly see that one resource is not enough.
Duolingo alone was a bit boring in the first ~3-4 months so I added several Memrise courses in parallel.
I had the luck that the Portuguese contributors had created very good “Tips and notes” (T&N) for the Duolingo web portal.
I had several “Aha” moments, even for my “Learn BR PT Basic” course where it either uses the Imperative or different verb (past or future) tenses.
Memrise showed me this stuff much earlier…which comes a bit later in the Duolingo tree.
You have the same luck with the German contributor course (the last CEFR A/B test was stopped):
T&N for German: Duolingo · Tips and Notes @ duome.eu
Some updated trees like French/Spanish from English (CEFR) are quite (too) long and introduce some grammar much later while they focus for the first half on the Present tense.
It is up to you if you want to add the Duolingo German from English tree (121 skills) now or later.
You can always have a look on the provided contributor T&N if some questions arise which Memrise does not explain, even if you do not start the course on Duolingo.
See how it goes for the first 1-3 Memrise courses and if you can handle this learning approach well.
You can always buy grammar books or sign up for any other external courses which explains thing step-by-step, but which will take longer.
Duolingo was nice for my PT BR learning (first Romance language) as I could drill verb tenses and conjugation and check alternative answers.
But yeah, it is nice to get back to Memrise (8 courses) and try to use your knowledge with other/different sentences which often get can quite complicated.
I have to admit:
I did not really understand some Romance stuff in the beginning, why suddenly verbs change one single letter at the end for this or that sentence (e.g. Imperative usage), not to speak about irregular verbs, or why they also change after the “que” or how “quando/se” (when/if) triggers special moods.
There are rules like when to use the “Subjunctive Future” (in Portuguese) and that you need to write the verb in the infinitive but often with the changed Future stem (sometimes the verb has the exact same spelling as the Indicative, but not conjugated…just plain Infinitive form).
Of course these examples only illustrate for my Romance language, not the German language.
If you never learn them more formally, this stuff is quite confusing in first 1,0-1,5 years.
But I think you get what I mean.
If you answer the same sentences wrong again and over again and you NEVER understand why it is exactly translated like in the final solution or why they are using a special word order…well then you need to spy at other resources.
Sometimes I wish the Memrise course owner / contributor team would FLAG sentences that they use this or that tense/mood (so you can more easily reference them) or why it is written exactly in the example sentence.
I am having some review fun for my resumed PT BR 1-5 courses after 3,4 years 
“Learn BR PT Basics” will the next (last) resumed course after a longer review break…
If you also rely on 1-2 other resources (books, Duolingo, DeutscheWelle, didactical university courses, etc.) then this will make your life easier in the mid- to long-term! 
So I definitely think that Lingvist provides a good feature that you can blend in the tips/grammar explanations and verb conjugation charts from the bottom of the page, when you have made an error so you can check and know it the next time it shows up again.
I am still missing this on Duolingo for the lessons.
But please do not feel pushed that you need to start the quite long Duolingo German tree with 121 skills in your first month.
I have heard that Duoligno staff has future plans to replace the contributor German from English with a a new CEFR tree (like French/Spanish).
This mean they (contractors) will probably remove ALL/the most dedicated “grammar skills” and replace them with theme-oriented topics and only implicit grammar usage.
This is how it has been happening to the French tree14/13/12/8…
The Duolingo CEFR Spanish from English course still has a few “leftover grammar skills” at the bottom in the last two sections 6+7.