Re: Memrise is moving our decks to Decks
Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2019 5:04 pm
lavengro wrote:Brun Ugle wrote: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.
I didn't make any wrong assumption. Based on all I have seen from them, I correctly assumed they have made one course of worse quality than the good user made ones per any language they saw worth of it, they chopped it into smaller chunks, and made their variations in various base languages. Again, just to some base languages, with Memrise itself admiting huge differences in the courses (for example, even the UK and US English based courses may vary in the amount of words significantly).
But let's assume for a while that the official courses are the main product, not the SRS platform. So, I went and looked at the official courses again. With only one question. How many words are there in an official course (the whole course, from 1 to 7). It is annoying the information is not clearly presented anywhere.
Ok, I will spend a few moments here and just count it level by level, to compare.
I'll take French as a good example.
If you use the French+ courses by Eunoia, you can learn over 35000 words, and there are many more courses, including large ones, courses on conjugation (mine is one of several), and anything you would like to create yourself.
With the official courses, you can learn 3006 words and phrases (including phrases like les chiens ne font pas des chats and l'hôpital a été fermé par les autorités, or je n'aime pas l'art). And that's it.
3000 wouldn't be a bad number per se (but of course the number is a bit lower, if we cut out the phrases). But would you pay for the Pro functions of Memrise for 3000 words? The cheapest option is the yearly subscription for 60 dollars.
3000 words are covered in many other products. Duolingo and Lingvist give 3000 for free (in Duolingo, the amount depends on the tree). 3000 are in a good coursebook, and that costs around 20 dollars and stays with you for how long you want it.
And also, let's not forget that a part of the learners has no problem with remembering the basic words seen everywhere but uses a tool like Memrise to learn the more advanced vocabulary.
I have never said that Memrise would be useless to everybody now. I have just noted, that it will be much less useful for a large part of the learners. Anyone wanting the large courses, the more advanced courses, or differently organised courses is without the offline app now and some people do mind. And all these people have little reason to pay for the worse product, the Memrise itself.
tl,dr:
1.The main Memrise right now is no better than lots of other products and actually rather expensive within the new league.
2.The Decks are ok, unless they get closed down in future,or you want to use the better quality user made decks in an offline app