Hi Everyone,

This is Steve Toy, Memrise's CEO, with my second attempt to provide you with answers to your questions. I hope you will let me do so.

My last attempt was voted down so quickly that I was left with negative karma and banned from the site. My appeals to Reddit admins fell on deaf ears.

I am here again with a new Reddit account, which I have cleared with this group's moderators in an attempt to get a different result this time around.

I will start with this simple introduction in the hope that it lets you know my intention and circle back tomorrow and beyond to start answering questions.

Steve

Long term user, 10+ years, and this was the straw that broke the camels back for me. Just got the message of our course deletions and forced conversion to the new system.

I exclusively use community courses, because my knowledge in my studied languages are way past the official courses. Furthermore creating my own courses to practice vocabulary I acquire ”in the wild” was a hugely useful tool for advanced study. Even when beginning a new language course at uni/evening course I’d use memrise to study the vocabulary from the course litterature - via community courses.

I’m sure the official courses are good, but you’re competing in an oversaturated market there, and frankly they’re not that good. Your fanbase was built on mems (dead since long), and community courses. The official courses was a nice addition that made memrise into a one-stop shop for many, but it wasn’t, and will never be your bread and butter.

You are removing what made you unique, and what made us stay, and spitting on the literal decade of progress and investment some of us have on your site. I will cancel my subscription and never return, because even if you revert this change, the fact that you even thought this was an implementable idea that’d respect your customers just shows how deluded you are to your userbase and how little you value our time, money, and loyalty. I’ve recommended you to countless acquaintances and been a subscriber because I found your services stellar. You are to remove everything I used and spit on my time. I wish I could say ”I hope you find a new userbase when your old one is gone” - but due to the disrespect shown us, you’ve demonstrated that you don’t deserve anyones custom nor time.

Enjoy bankruptcy and a dead app. I’m off to reluctantly try to learn how to use Anki

Really struggled to write something as memrise won't care or read it anyway, but I'm really frustated the way memrise is going forward. It's just my inner rant I had going on in my mind

I really liked memrise a lot, because the presentation of cards/vocab was one of the best in my opinion. I still struggle to this day getting anki or other tools to work like memrise, e.g. showing me a word in the target language first before asking me to translate it immediatley. Have used memrise to learn for my uni courses or just for fun at home, in the subway, on vacations...

Then I was surprised by the app suddenly redirecting me to the Webpage on mobile with a small text "as announced". I can't remember reading it anywhere in the app or that memrise even bothered making a banner in your course overview telling you that. Tried to find something on their social media accounts, but nothing.
Instead I got way too many offers for lifetime subscriptions and that they "managed to get another 5000 lifetme subs with reduced price", wow!
It really seems to me that they were trying to get some people to pay for subs before they change the app and won't get to sell that many subs anymore...

What really annoys me is the way memrise is favouring it's "new shiny" features instead of the older day of traditional learning.
Working in IT myself, I started to feel raw hate for companies that jump on the AI hype train just because it sounds great and new and shiney and promises more money than you could ever imagine. Most of the AI models work fine but are quite overrated especially with langauge specific stuff. if you ask them to explain certain grammar or syntax related stuff, they fail regularly.
But it is such a great feature to talk to a boring AI chatbot in spanish now instead of learning your own set of vocabs or things you always wanted to learn (great thing about memrise: it wasn't just for languages). But at least a CEO had a great idea...

I'm really frustrated about memrise just screwing over people that used a great learning tool and are now stuck with alternatives that don't work as good or in a way that you have to get used to it.
And sad that I have to restart my own courses somewhere else which is a huge time issue to get used to a new app, get all the vocab in there and not letting all this kill my motivation to continue to learn.

All in all, with what memrise was doing so far with Decks and closing the forum and now the AI-bs and getting rid of the community courses, I come to the conclusion for myself that memrise deserves to die. Like Duolingo they don't care about their community, but at least duo admits that they trust and love their numbers more than their users.

Have fun with your AI, because apparently everything is so much better with AI.

Hi everyone, just wanted to update you all on community courses and the general direction Memrise is taking, since it's been a little while since we posted here.

I want to reassure everyone that we are not planning on taking down the community website at the end of 2025. I know there are a lot of threads on that topic, so we knew it was important to share this with you.

We’ve also been exploring how to bring back large parts of the community course creation features you all loved. It won’t all come back in one big drop, and some bits may look a little different than before, but the idea is to bring back a lot of the functionality.

I know this has felt like a long road. All I can say is thanks for sticking with us, and please keep bearing with us while we figure this out.

It's a sad time tbh. Been using Memrise since 2016 and really liked the concept and how the site was so I bought lifetime. Learned a lot with it but last couple of years had been busy so didn't really use Memrise. Couple of months ago I used Memrise again and saw that there were big changes happening.

Today I was planning on using Memrise again after having finished Duolingo, but what I found was a soulless app identical to any other app. I never liked the Memrise made courses since the beginning, and even if they tried their best to improve them, it never felt quite right and always felt like they wanted to imitate Duolingo in a way but by using their own system.

Removing community courses for me marks the death of this one great application. First they removed the images, then they started forcing their own courses more, and now they are removing the soul.

One more reminder that companies will become deaf and only listen to their own marketing team instead of the community which helped to make Memrise great in the first place.

Rest in peace Memrise, you were a good friend and it's a terrible loss to all language learners. You will be missed.

Once upon a time, there was an app that had a true community of language learners engaged in it. The name was memrise. Using it, you could access a lot of simply crazy massive flashcards: as the most frequent 10,000 words in German... you also had amazing RANKINGS. Where you could see crazy people go around memorizing 100k words over the lifetime inside the app.

You got curious and you also wanted to memorize more words, and it was amazing, free and super with paying. If you were a strong language learner, you would study grammar and at night having super memrise sessions with the most frequent 10k words in the language for hours.

Oh, dont forget the super revision sessions with lots of words. The impact was immediate and everybody was seeing everybody's efforts.

Now... Guess what?

It is another app trying to engage in new methods where they add "REAL PEOPLE" say one word so you can memorize more words. It became a Duolingo 2.0, trying to surf on the same business model and become an all-in-one app where you can, supposedly, learn a language by paying 500BRL over a lifetime.

But... The courses are simply boring, the review sessions painful, and having to watch those shorts videos of people just make me think: WHAT THE FUCK happened to the app which was the polyglot's biggest ally? Now I have to be on ANKI (which keeps the flash cards, but it does not have the same review dynamics as (g)old memrise.

You made the effort to create a community of learners and then destroyed it. That is one of a kind.

Please, let the older users access the intensive and massive flashcard packs as in the past!! That is what we need, that is what we won't. I don't want a PERSON saying a phrase to me.

It's a sad time tbh. Been using Memrise since 2016 and really liked the concept and how the site was so I bought lifetime. Learned a lot with it but last couple of years had been busy so didn't really use Memrise. Couple of months ago I used Memrise again and saw that there were big changes happening.

Today I was planning on using Memrise again after having finished Duolingo, but what I found was a soulless app identical to any other app. I never liked the Memrise made courses since the beginning, and even if they tried their best to improve them, it never felt quite right and always felt like they wanted to imitate Duolingo in a way but by using their own system.

Removing community courses for me marks the death of this one great application. First they removed the images, then they started forcing their own courses more, and now they are removing the soul.

One more reminder that companies will become deaf and only listen to their own marketing team instead of the community which helped to make Memrise great in the first place.

Rest in peace Memrise, you were a good friend and it's a terrible loss to all language learners. You will be missed.

I know this is redundant but this is my little rant about the current state of affairs that I was happy to see we all agree on.

Memrise was the reason I got to the level of Japanese that I did. Because of Memrise I was able to speak an entirely new language and interact in-depth and achieve a level I never knew I could. It sounds dramatic, but those stupid pictures really did make a world of difference for me. When they took them away (I never found out when, they just...evaporated), I thought "Okay...I must be imagining things..." I stuck to it, but not nearly as much as I did before.

Now we're all brought together once more in the face of Community Courses disappearing. I see My Little World is taking off and that makes me happy, but I'm always going to miss the UI and, god help me, the memes. The Community Courses are, without a fragment of a doubt, miles better than the official courses and being able to custom-create your own lessons by mixing and matching?? Godly.

But here we are, and I'm sorry to see it go.

色々ありがとうございました 、メームライズ

That’s it. I’ve just opened Memrise and wowww only official courses. My subscription ends in July, and it will be the end of 12 years of a fruitful partnership.

Thanks for all who created each Community Course.

Memrise is now only for beginners and won’t be useful for those who are advanced or simply love to learn languages as a hobby (mainly my case).

My recommendations:

For general learning: Busuu, Babbel, Mondly

English: Elsa (for speaking) and BBC courses

French: Chatterburg / Apprendre (TV5)

German: DW courses, VHS

I accept recommendations for learning Spanish and Maltese :)

F

edit: kinda saved? but not really?

Wow, they're basically telling me I don't know how to learn a language, and everything they offered in the past wasn't what you needed to really learn one. I'm sure hundreds of thousands of people would disagree.

Hello, everyone! :) This is neoncube. I originally posted this to the Memrise forums, but those forums have now been shut down, so I'm now also posting it here.

Memrise community courses are shutting down

The Memrise community courses are scheduled to be shut down within the next few months.

If you own or are learning a community course, there are a few options:

• I’m automatically cloning essentially all community courses to my website, mylittlewordland.com

• If you’re the owner of a course, considering messaging u/nphxx to have him clone your course to alpha.deckademy.com

• You can download your courses for use with Anki, using the CourseDump2022 script made by u/Eltaurus

Memrise forums have been shut down

The Memrise forums (https://community.memrise.com) have been shut down.

I’ve put up a read-only copy of the Memrise forums at https://mylittlewordland.com/memriseforum/ . Sadly, that copy didn't capture the last month or so of forum activity, but it should otherwise be pretty complete :)

Some users of the Memrise forums also backed up some threads to https://web.archive.org

Other notes

As I’m sure is true for many others, I’ve had a great time using Memrise over the last 10 years! It’s sad to see the forums and community courses be shut down, but at its core, Memrise is a business, it needs money to stay open, and Memrise has decided to concentrate their efforts elsewhere, which I think is their right! :)

Let’s all give a hand to Ben Whately and the rest of the Memrise team! They’ve put a lot of time and effort into Memrise, over the years :)

Also a special thank you to Ben Whately for giving me permission to clone all Memrise community courses, even the old official courses made by the Memrise team! ^_^

If you see someone who doesn’t seem aware of this topic, please link them to it! Message your friends and let them know! Let’s get the word out! :)

I'm writing this rant as I'm so frustrated with watching the best language learning app turn into a very basic garbage app that is trying to cater to having as many users as possible and generating as much revenue as possible instead of creating a great and useful language learning experience.

It's not just the community courses that got affected it's a whole lot of shitification process that ruined the whole app.

This used to be such a great app focusing on all aspects of learning a language, now it just feels like a random app with repetitive AI generated content.

Like how many times do I need to tell the app that no i don't want to use your AI chat bot and yet it asks me that after every single fucking session. Before it used to work in such a logical way directing you to the step that makes sense like learning new words after you reviewed all the words etc.

They are all up there busy making bullshit features without implementing very basic things such as telling me where I made a mistake in a sentence or what part of a word i typed out wrong which would actually be very helpful.

The down fall began when they started doing things like removing mems and the ability to type out sentences by default, which proves again and again to be a way more effective way to learn a language.

I work in tech as well and I know that most companies only care about is increasing one statistic which is Daily Active Users because they thing that corresponds directly to growth and profit(it's not always the case btw) and they use all kind of techniques like reducing friction and simplifying the experience which guess what? Doesn't work well when you are trying to learn a language.

IM LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE, ITS SUPPOSED TO BE DIFFICULT, ITS SUPPOSED TO CHALLANGE ME ITS SUPPOSED TO HAVE FRICTION I DONT WANT A MINDLESS EXPERIENCE.

Like there is still a billion apps out there that can teach you how to order coffe in french, why kill one of the few that can actually teach you a language when there is clearly a market for it and the people that actually care are very upset.

This is so sad honestly, and it's all because someone in analytics is trying to make this company generate more revenue.

Thank you to the tech industry and modern software development methodologies for destroying everything I love about software. This is not a message to the people who build software this is a message to the people who make decisions at these companies, you suck man you did a very bad job and I need you to know that. And if you have a soul it's time to scrap everything and start over because someone needs to fix this or leave.

Jumpin' right into it!

A1 German / A2 German

A1 Spanish / A2 Spanish

A1 French

Happy learning friends :)

The entire purpose of this app is learning a new language. and it was doing that really well with the curriculum type of tailored courses and follow ups etc. After that hideous flash point i clearly couldn’t understand where to go or what to follow because they turned it into such a mess. Reading the other premium users’ experiences and their disappointments turning into canceling their subscription made me rooting for the downfall of this app even more. I hope the number of daily active users go to hell and maybe they would regret their decision of thinking this update would make the app more intuitive and more user friendly and they would consider a much better user experience.

Once again, to whom made this update roll out, go fuck yourself

Hello! Since Memrise chose to fuck us all over and it just so happens that me and my bf are both programmers, we decided to make a new app. We want it to have all basic functions that Memrise had - community courses, spaced repeptition, words marked as "hard words" that you can repete, levels included in the courses, pictures that you can attach to a word (like original Memrise had) etc. It would help us a lot if we got your input on what other features we can add to make it the ultimate language learning app. We already have a pretty good idea since I've been using Memrise for years but I'm sure there are things I haven't though of. So if you have any input or suggestions, please let us know!

Ps, it's gonna take awhile to get the app + site going and eventually get it out on the market so don't expect anything soon. But better late than never, right?

EDIT: Thank you for all your great responses! We've made a form for those who want to follow along on the journey and get updates etc. The idea is to create a Discord server and a social media account as soon as we can so we can be in contact and get input from people!

https://tally.so/r/mZ6oVy

I was a beta tester and I hated the new concept. Also I need community courses. Thanks for all the fish and good bye.

All,

I tried to jump into this conversation more than a week ago and quickly went to a negative karma balance and got banned from Reddit. With my appeals for a reversal unsuccessful, I created a new account, checked in with the moderators of this group and answered a few questions to build enough Karma to be able to attempt the conversation once again.

While dealing with the platform's logistics, I kept reading your posts. It became clear that you all want to know why this is happening. The deeper why, not the tactical answer that we flubbed the comms on our migration efforts.

Against all the advice I have received about the impossibility of having a deeper conversation on platforms like this, I’m going to try because my reading of this community is that we are aligned and connected intellectually and emotionally to the common cause of lifelong learning, primarily in the area of languages. We are the same in this regard. You are our base in this regard. Something you desperately want me to understand, and I do.

Almost every reader will want to scream at this point: if we are the same in this regard, Steve, you would not be doing what you are doing. I know this because the conversation I have been reading here for the last ten days says that.

This is my honest attempt to answer all of the permutations of that core question in one place. I will start with my clinical description of the community with the benefit of the data I have given my role in the company.

Details about this community

As with all user-generated communities, there is a lot of content. Many tens of thousands of courses exist. There are hundreds of different courses in many of the most popular languages, which are effectively creative arrangements of the words in a given language. The words in the courses come from the same finite dictionary that describes any language. Again, they are just arranged differently.

They are also often translated differently. Sometimes, to capture nuance. Sometimes just plain wrong.

Each of these courses is really important to a few of you. None of these courses are important to all of you or the broader public, as confirmed by Google. As a result, from an SEO standpoint, this entire community exerts a tremendous downward force on our rankings.

Of course, groupings of things that search engines can see have more weight. For example, if you add up all of the courses in French, it is clear that people are interested in learning French.

However, because all of these courses are rearrangements of the same words and the translations are often different, there is no canonical reference from a search engine’s standpoint to Memrise’s point of view on the meaning of Bonjour or Hola. That is death in this business. That is one reason we need a single dictionary for each language whose quality and canonical reference we can control.

There are also a lot of courses related to things other than language, which provides an impression of a more diffuse area of expertise than Memrise actually has or wants to communicate.

By way of example, based on the ten most clicked-on courses from Google searches, Google thinks this community, on the whole, is most interested in the positions of the kama sutra. You can see how that is a problem for a language-learning company.

This is why we have had to no-index the community courses, which I understand is frustrating to you all.

Why our users want to learn a language

Over the years, we have had more than 70 million users pass through our app, and the overwhelming majority of them tell us that their “why” for learning a language is to connect with others.

Sometimes, they want to connect with family or co-workers. Sometimes, they want to connect with people when they travel. Sometimes, they want to be able to connect with the travelers they serve and make more money in the process to better their lives.

The overwhelmingly most popular chat in our LLM-driven MemBot is “How to say I love you without saying I love you.”

The most significant complaint about our traditional product, the one at the heart of these community courses, is that people have memorized a lot of words but don’t understand a thing in Paris or Tokyo.

We want you, our users, to succeed at accomplishing these goals, which is why our pedagogy demands that not only do we need to help you memorize words as we always have, but we also need to help you practice hearing those words in a real-life context and using those words to be understood by others.

This is why we have added the features and content we have added.

We are not doing it because AI is cool, though it is. We are doing it because it helps our users accomplish the goal of learning words and then practice using those words to achieve their goals.

A word about costs and “who pays the bills”

The cost I am most worried about is the opportunity cost of not providing a product that users want.

I am not overly worried about the hosting costs of this community. I can mitigate the SEO costs of hosting this community by no-indexing the site.

As I mentioned, this community is our intellectual and emotional base due to your commitment to lifelong learning.

This community is not our financial base and makes up a very small percentage of our revenue.

This is not a slight in any way. This is the reality for many reasons, the most significant of which is that we haven’t nurtured and evolved the unique features of community courses that you all find valuable. If we aren’t investing in it, why should you? I get that.

I hope that the reasons I have provided for not investing in community courses are clear. It is not because we don’t value you. It is because these courses alone won’t help the largest percentage of our users, paying and otherwise, accomplish the goals they want to accomplish. To do that, we must build and evolve the core product you see unfolding today.

Going Forward

With all that said, we will host community courses on the new domain, https://community-courses.memrise.com/, for the foreseeable future, at least until the end of 2024. This domain will be accessible on desktop and mobile via a browser.

We will actively improve our comms about the timeline for removing community courses from the app, which will need to happen before the end of March.

Access to community courses from the app is the only thing we are removing this year.

Removal of community courses from the app does not mean they are lost. They will be on the web. You will be able to access them with a mobile device.

We will also work with the various entrepreneurial folks who want to develop a sustainable long-term solution in any way we can without violating the rights of individual course creators.

Thank you for getting this far. I hope you found it worth your time, and I look forward to the conversation that results from this post.

With apologies for my mistakes…

Steve Toy

CEO Memrise

Hello there!
This morning, I brought the Mems feature back into Memrise!
It's now possible to:
- Create your own mems (and then you choose if you want them public or private)
- You can just write a text, or upload an image (and crop it in the interface) with a text, or use AI to generate mem pictures.
- Upvote or downvote or report the mems of others, and flag inappropriate content created by other users.
For now, the feature exists only on the Memrise website (not the mobile apps, nor the community-courses.memrise.com website).
Today, I only made it available for when the source language is English, because I'm waiting for the translators to finish localising the UI into more languages, but the rest of the source languages should be available before next week.
Let me know if you have feedbacks or questions!
Alexis

Its not just matter of my personal preference. I'm a person who needs more time to get used to new things. That's natural for me to not to like changes. But the new layout? The color palette does not even match, the layout itself is buggy in many places, such as the icons on the bottom of the page, the Save button in the course's edit mode, etc.

Seriously, don't you have the test phase before you release an update?

Community courses were an excellent feature which was so useful and the only reason to even use the stupid app

"Enshittification definition: the gradual degradation of an online platform or service's functionality, as part of a cycle in which the platform or service first offers benefits to users to attract them, then pursues more and more profits at the expense of users"

I feel terrible for users of community courses. That seems to be where all the attention is going (for obvious reasons!), so I wanted to mention my experience with the changes as someone who only uses memrise-created courses.

They used to be brilliant with the mems and the focus on native speakers, the reasons I started using memrise in 2016.They are declining into a mess not designed to teach language, but designed to keep you on the platform. To suck in as many casual learners as possible, for as long as possible. The best way to do that is AI-generated courses, so they can expand quickly for little cost. It's significantly more scalable to generate an AI course instead of paying people to create content.

I see so many comments about leadership not understanding. They understand, they know exactly what they are doing. Companies don't put people at the top who are capable of saying "we have reached a great balance that is mutually beneficial." They put people at the top who will never stop looking for quarterly growth no matter the methods they need to use to accomplish it.

Some colleagues and I are designing an alternative to memrise community courses / smart.fm. It will be free for all, open source and community moderated. We also would like to adopt an impeachable sales (or lack-there-of) model. To be clear, this is not a profit seeking venture. As such I am posting here to gauge interest as this will ultimately determine our ability to keep this project afloat, through donations for hosting costs and engagement in community content creation and moderation.

If you would like to express interests or concerns, share insights, help us choose a name or get involved please comment or like this post or fill out this form.

Design principles: 100% crowdsourced content Free Ad-free Opensource Low gamification