Re: Memrise is moving our decks to Decks
Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2019 10:56 pm
Short: very disappointed. Will check out alternatives and try to save some of my own and user generated courses elsewhere.
Long:
For unusual languages (Cebuano), memrise was fantastic.
Being a language learning novice with no resources and lots of 5 minute sessions available most days (waiting for people to show up to meetings, baby sitting multitasking) I got through thousands of items (words and phrases) in just a few months.
I just checked. I'm at 7.3 million points and 6500 words/phrases (mostly from a few months in 2015). All using the app. I'm currently and was above a few memrise staff (eg. Ben Whately but plenty more at the time). Nowhere near some of the people like ericad, suba etc at 200/100 million plus who I suspect have slowed down from their peaks anyway.
It really got me going even though many of the courses were incomplete, plain wrong, based on archaic versions of Cebuano. It was by far the most effective thing for me at that time. I found sentence courses best for me, but needed the word ones initially.
I haven't used it extensively for a few years (well not as mad) but dip in now and then (EG on a shuttle bus). I created some courses but the best Cebuano ones were added by a user quite recently and I have a lot more of their courses to go through.
I felt uneasy at changes to the app and read up on how the first contributers seemed to have been promised reward via some mechanism and then the app went wifi only (since changed), annoying and I found listening-reading, readlang, 10000 sentences (Spanish), my own code instead.
I think that the initial premise as I understand it was correct and everything since then has been wrong. They had a niche that they dominated and now they want to go and compete in segments which Duolingo and others have sewn up.
I'm also aware that some teachers/schools create memrise courses and set homework of so many points per week.
I really don't get it.
Hosting user created courses is pretty cheap. Text used for some courses EG Cebuano really cheap. Audio/images/video maybe more expensive but cloud hosting gets ever cheaper. Downloading once to an offline app should be cheap.
Sharing just a little money (prizes?) with course creators is much cheaper than employing course creators. And can they do it better or cheaper than the Duolingo model?
10000 sentences android app (creator is on here? It's fast and good) Could form a basis / inspiration for a replacement with a web interface for using on big screens and also course creation. If commercial, I'd like to see course creators get rewarded through money or at least recognition.
The only problem is marketing, how to reach. That's expensive for a commercial app/site.
Long:
For unusual languages (Cebuano), memrise was fantastic.
Being a language learning novice with no resources and lots of 5 minute sessions available most days (waiting for people to show up to meetings, baby sitting multitasking) I got through thousands of items (words and phrases) in just a few months.
I just checked. I'm at 7.3 million points and 6500 words/phrases (mostly from a few months in 2015). All using the app. I'm currently and was above a few memrise staff (eg. Ben Whately but plenty more at the time). Nowhere near some of the people like ericad, suba etc at 200/100 million plus who I suspect have slowed down from their peaks anyway.
It really got me going even though many of the courses were incomplete, plain wrong, based on archaic versions of Cebuano. It was by far the most effective thing for me at that time. I found sentence courses best for me, but needed the word ones initially.
I haven't used it extensively for a few years (well not as mad) but dip in now and then (EG on a shuttle bus). I created some courses but the best Cebuano ones were added by a user quite recently and I have a lot more of their courses to go through.
I felt uneasy at changes to the app and read up on how the first contributers seemed to have been promised reward via some mechanism and then the app went wifi only (since changed), annoying and I found listening-reading, readlang, 10000 sentences (Spanish), my own code instead.
I think that the initial premise as I understand it was correct and everything since then has been wrong. They had a niche that they dominated and now they want to go and compete in segments which Duolingo and others have sewn up.
I'm also aware that some teachers/schools create memrise courses and set homework of so many points per week.
I really don't get it.
Hosting user created courses is pretty cheap. Text used for some courses EG Cebuano really cheap. Audio/images/video maybe more expensive but cloud hosting gets ever cheaper. Downloading once to an offline app should be cheap.
Sharing just a little money (prizes?) with course creators is much cheaper than employing course creators. And can they do it better or cheaper than the Duolingo model?
10000 sentences android app (creator is on here? It's fast and good) Could form a basis / inspiration for a replacement with a web interface for using on big screens and also course creation. If commercial, I'd like to see course creators get rewarded through money or at least recognition.
The only problem is marketing, how to reach. That's expensive for a commercial app/site.