A language learners’ forum

lavengro wrote:I also only use the web site version. It is my understanding that the Memrise official courses are designed to the B1 level in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure, which is a low level for many on this forum, but still of use to many others on this forum, myself included. I have used both community-generated and Memrise official courses for a variety of languages in the past. I think the official courses I have tried (Spanish and Italian to this point) are on the whole pretty well put together.

I've done all of their French courses, most of their Spanish and German ones and few others, like some of the Swedish, Japanese and Italian ones. I've gotten some good use out of them--a few years ago I did 4 weeks of nothing but French, where I crammed through the 7 French courses and it did wonders for my pronunciation and listening at the time. Generally I found those course were quite well made. I liked the videos of fluent speakers, as they included such a variety of different speakers that it was quite a good way to practice listening. And in general the audio is very clear and good-quality. I am not using any right now, but I would be very disappointed if the coming changes to Memrise pay-wall them or otherwise make them inaccessible.

languist wrote:I only have access to a Mac, if anyone happens to figure out how to do it, I’d really appreciate it if you could post a comment here.

The chrome extension 'Memrise on Steroids' has a 'collector' tool that will extract everything from a course and put it into a CSV, which can then be imported to Anki.
Not sure if it does audio, but for pure words it works well enough.

Beli Tsar wrote:

languist wrote:I only have access to a Mac, if anyone happens to figure out how to do it, I’d really appreciate it if you could post a comment here.

The chrome extension 'Memrise on Steroids' has a 'collector' tool that will extract everything from a course and put it into a CSV, which can then be imported to Anki.
Not sure if it does audio, but for pure words it works well enough.

Thank you! It does seem to be without the audio, and audio is basically the only reason why I use memrise. Anyone have an idea of how to even export the text (like with this extension) and the audio separately? I was searching online but couldn't find anything which works on Mac. ;___;

Awkward timing... When it comes to stability I never trusted Memrise a lot so a few weeks ago I decided to use the memrise2anki extension (again) and imported what I was using to Anki. Personally it won't affect me a lot since I was already using Anki for a "offline mode/emergency", if I needed. I guess I'll have to wait and see how things go when they start to migrate things.

Cavesa wrote:About the Memrise Pro refunds: I've read posts by people elsewhere, that they are not getting answers from Memrise, except for generic links to info about the conditions of refunds (which do not apply to anyone, who has paid at the end of the year, as you have one month to ask for a refund).

The whole thing seems like it's going to be a nightmare to handle. I saw a person who has got the lifetime subscription and only uses user-created courses... I really hope people will get some kind of refund. It won't be fair for a lot of them.

I'll add here the features from the FAQ topic

Available in Decks:
Learning and Reviewing Sessions:
Learn
Classic Review
Difficult Words
Speed Review
Listening Skills

Other learning features:
Mems
Leaderboards
Points
Learning Settings
Streak
Daily Goal

Course Creation:
Course Editor
Groups

Not Available in Decks:
Chatbot and Grammarbot
Learn with Locals
Pronunciation mode
Learning Stats
Grammar mode
Offline mode
App

I wonder if this means they will add more official courses. Assuming a majority of people are only learning one language, the app will be pretty limited without all the user created courses...

dicentra8 wrote:The whole thing seems like it's going to be a nightmare to handle.

I think it already has become a nightmare for Memrise Inc. People are unhappy. And I doubt Memrise is going to change their minds at this point because if they're ready to launch this new site in a couple of weeks, they've already put in a ton of planning and work already. They probably knew users wouldn't like this, so they didn't make it public until the 11th hour, figuratively speaking, so they wouldn't have to deal with months of people yelling at them.

By the way, the cat in your profile pic looks like if someone merged my two cats into one cat.

MacGyver wrote:I wonder if this means they will add more official courses. Assuming a majority of people are only learning one language, the app will be pretty limited without all the user created courses...

Cèid Donn wrote:

dicentra8 wrote:The whole thing seems like it's going to be a nightmare to handle.

I think it already has become a nightmare for Memrise Inc. People are unhappy. And I doubt Memrise is going to change their minds at this point because if they're ready to launch this new site in a couple of weeks, they've already put in a ton of planning and work already. They probably knew users wouldn't like this, so they didn't make it public until the 11th hour, figuratively speaking, so they wouldn't have to deal with months of people yelling at them.

These are very good points.

Memrise ha shown they don't care much about the user feedback before. But they have never changed the product completely. I would be very curious about the amount of refound emails they're getting these days, and the users not renewing.

In past, they were changing some functions, the design, etc. But the basic product was the same. An SRS with memes and with a huge amount of courses, a few of which were made by the company itself.

Now, they are changing the huge SRS into something like Duolingo or Babbel or another beginner app. Will the amount and quality of their content be enough for so much money or will they have to make their Pro much cheaper? Will they have that many users, or will those go to their new competitors, as Memrise has just limited themselves to an already populated part of the market?

It looks like they've decided to go a few levels down. They are now much more comparable to Duolingo, Lingvist, Clozemaster, Babbel, Lingodeer, and normal coursebooks. That is a different kind of competition. I'd say that is the important part of the Memrise's future. Will they manage to have better PR than Duolingo, more varied exercises like Babbel, good srs like Lingvist, lots of official content like Clozemaster, and a great app like Lingodeer?

The older users are getting the message "we do not care about you or your work volunteered for our profit at all". So, the newbies will decide. It might be fun to watch the Memrise fall or rise, when we'll have adapted to the situation and moved the decks to other platforms.

Cavesa wrote:....

.... a few of which were made by the company itself. ....

For anyone who may be interested, the present total of Memrise official language courses is 1238, including such diverse languages as Icelandic, Slovenian and Mongolian. This is entirely exclusive of the community-developed language courses which are still being hosted.

https://www.memrise.com/user/Memrise/courses/teaching/

lavengro wrote:

Cavesa wrote:....

.... a few of which were made by the company itself. ....

For anyone who may be interested, the present total of Memrise official language courses is 1238, including such diverse languages as Icelandic, Slovenian and Mongolian. This is entirely exclusive of the community-developed language courses which are still being hosted.

https://www.memrise.com/user/Memrise/courses/teaching/

True, but many of those are basically the same course with different base languages. Also, the courses are divided up into many short courses with, for example, German 1, German 2, German 3, etc., each counting as a separate course. If they then have each course available from an English, Spanish, French, and Chinese base (and maybe a few others), it’s easy to see how one course turns into fifty or a hundred. So, while the list of courses is long, the value to any one subscriber is going to be low.

Brun Ugle wrote:

lavengro wrote:

Cavesa wrote:....

.... a few of which were made by the company itself. ....

For anyone who may be interested, the present total of Memrise official language courses is 1238, including such diverse languages as Icelandic, Slovenian and Mongolian. This is entirely exclusive of the community-developed language courses which are still being hosted.

https://www.memrise.com/user/Memrise/courses/teaching/

True, but many of those are basically the same course with different base languages. Also, the courses are divided up into many short courses with, for example, German 1, German 2, German 3, etc., each counting as a separate course. If they then have each course available from an English, Spanish, French, and Chinese base (and maybe a few others), it’s easy to see how one course turns into fifty or a hundred. So, while the list of courses is long, the value to any one subscriber is going to be low.

Fair enough. I posted this information because, until I started to look into it, I made the same assumption as Cavasa - that Memrise had developed only a few courses itself. Almost all of the 1,238 courses are going to be of no use to me ever. But I can see all of them being of potential use to someone within the language learning community (ie. that Korean-language speaker looking for learning materials for Russian, or a Mandarin-speaker looking for Spanish language learning materials. Even for accomplished monoglot English speakers such as myself, I was surprised to see how my English-based Memrise-developed material there was, across a much wider range of languages than I had been aware of.