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On November 12 2011 18:18 ther wrote:
How many new words do you learn at a time? The system gives you seven, but you have the opportunity to learn another seven and so on...
It depends how much free time I have and the drive to keep up with it. I did 260 words this week and have invested about an hour a day. I plan to, on average, do an hour a day per week.
I keep planting new seeds until I get bored or feel like it's time to revise and just spend as much time as necessary to master at least 90% of the words I planted.
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Question: I'm just noticing this as I'm branching out to find a new wordlist to learn and see that with wordlists that I haven't even touched have words in the green house already, but does the website remove words you've already seen from other wordlists so you only focus on learning new material and revising old material?
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i used this for a while and found it funny for a couple of days. however, they need to fix some kind of sound challenge on mandarin so there's not only pinyin/sign challenges. that would be gold.
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On November 12 2011 18:18 ther wrote:
How many new words do you learn at a time? The system gives you seven, but you have the opportunity to learn another seven and so on...
i try to learn 30-40 words a day, and harvest in the same day. 7 is too easy to remember.
as i haven't even learnt hangul properly, i havent really bothered with korean for a while, ive been doing lessons from talktomeinkorean first, then plan to use memrise for vocab later - i didnt realise it was this hard when you're an ABSOLUTE beginner lol
oh and i always try to make top 5 as well :D
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I've been learning words from SAT Essential here and there, around 190 so far. Feels nice to broaden my vocabulary.
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On November 13 2011 07:37 Babyfactory wrote:
Question: I'm just noticing this as I'm branching out to find a new wordlist to learn and see that with wordlists that I haven't even touched have words in the green house already, but does the website remove words you've already seen from other wordlists so you only focus on learning new material and revising old material?
[Memrise co-founder here]
This is a great question. The short answer is that our spaced repetition algorithm operates happily across wordlists.
I haven't tried to explain it in writing before, so let me know if this makes sense to you.
We build a model of how well you know each word. A word can live in multiple wordlists. So if you've learned it in one wordlist, and then start learning another, then we know it's already been planted, or harvested, or is wilting. So when you start the new wordlist, we'll automatically intermingle new and old words, focusing on words you don't know so well. So we don't 'remove' the words you already know, but they will probably get tested less.
Phew. That was kind of a wordy explanation of a simple idea. Basically, you can learn multiple overlapping wordlists, and everything should just work!
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On November 13 2011 07:47 tsilaicos wrote:
i used this for a while and found it funny for a couple of days. however, they need to fix some kind of sound challenge on mandarin so there's not only pinyin/sign challenges. that would be gold.
Hey there tsilaicos,
It's funny you should mention that. We're prototyping a new mini-game to help learn to distinguish Mandarin tones. Would you be interested in being one of our beta testers?
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On November 12 2011 17:24 Babyfactory wrote:
I just finished the Beginning Spanish... time to attack the Intermediate Spanish and all the word lists pertaining to verbs.
It's unbelievably convenient to have a site with "premade" flash cards and tests.
[Memrise co-founder here]
Hey Babyfactory,
I'm learning Spanish too, and I was psyched to realize that someone added a load of intermediate words for reading Harry Potter in Spanish, which is something I've been trying to do. I've been really enjoying it, and adding mems as I go - maybe you'll get a kick out of it too.
http://www.memrise.com/set/10001999/harry-potter/
g
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On November 12 2011 03:21 DarkSider wrote:
Another quick bug:
In the leaderboard if you're not listed in top 100 your rank is displayed as the amount of ppl in the leaderboard (4850) instead your real rank
[Memrise co-founder here]
Ack, good point. We'll try and fix that soon.
I figure you guys know more about game design than pretty much anyone else, so can I throw a general question out to the floor.
Our leaderboards are getting pretty intimidating - I have a hard time getting in the top 50, even on the daily list. Do you have any ideas for how we could restructure or scope them to be friendlier to new users?
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On November 14 2011 08:24 gregdetre wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2011 03:21 DarkSider wrote:
Another quick bug:
In the leaderboard if you're not listed in top 100 your rank is displayed as the amount of ppl in the leaderboard (4850) instead your real rank [Memrise co-founder here] Ack, good point. We'll try and fix that soon. I figure you guys know more about game design than pretty much anyone else, so can I throw a general question out to the floor. Our leaderboards are getting pretty intimidating - I have a hard time getting in the top 50, even on the daily list. Do you have any ideas for how we could restructure or scope them to be friendlier to new users?
Firstly, don't change the global leaderboard - I only started a few days ago and it was really satisfying to see my rank shoot up 1000s every day, and if the leaderboards are "scoped", it takes away some of its legitimacy, therefore removing some of the drive to compete. It's still perfectly possible to reach the daily leaderboard, even with only 30 minutes of practice.
However, it is possible to get points waaaaay too quickly simply by watering healthy plants that you already know off by heart. It might be possible to balance the points system so that players are encouraged to at least take on a few new words every day. One way of doing this is to give huge bonuses when a user performs a successful harvest on the first X words of the day, and by drastically reducing the points given for words that have been successfully recognised over Y times. That way, those who get into the leaderboard would be those who are learning the most words with the greatest accuracy.
For game design that appeals to anyone, you'll want to introduce non-competitive gameplay elements, as competitive play can be intimidating to certain types of people. For instance, an RPG experience might be a good bet, where "grinding" gives psychologically satisfying rewards. Obviously memrise already has this to a degree, as it used this idea of "harvesting plants" and preventing them from "wilting". If you've never played World of Warcraft (or farmville, which memrise seems to imitate to an extent) you'd be amazed at what tedium players will willingly put up with for hours on end, just to reach the next level or get a new piece of kit.
Google "behavioural game design". There are articles that discuss all the possible player motivations, and it might contain some ideas.
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Well, this seems interesting. Perfect timing for me, too, since I'm learning mandarin in school. Shall try this out as practice.
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this is like really cool and actually pretty damned addictive
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Canada9496 Posts
Thanks, this has been pretty awesome so far! 
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I agree with TheUltimate on the leaderboard issue.
If I would really want to shoot up the leaderboard, I could just keep watering my 80 harvested spanish plants and I would be on top in no time. TheUltimate proposes a bonus for harvesting the first X plants each day and diminish point income from plants that don't need water at all. I fully support this, as it would 'fix' the leaderboard a lot more, and would really encourage those competetive memriseplayers (lol) to learn new words
A fair leaderboard can't really be easy to get on top to for newcomers, they simply know too little (or in terms of most games - they have too little skill, and need to train on that).
My experience is though, that with limited amount of time, I still see myself rise in rank really quickly, without too much effort (only did 180 words this week). I think achievements (and titles?) are a great way to get newcomers to motivate newcomers.
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TL_Gamerah ,sounds like a pretty cool way to study for my chinese class as well. i'll give it a shot
Edit: Okay i can definitely see why this would be addictive.
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Another idea for Leaderboard: Make also a "How many leards learnt" and "Correct testresults (%) of new words". So there´s the main Leaderboard for the grinders ( ) and the other both leaderboards reward learning expecially good or much.
Imagine how hard you would try to remember if you want to be on the TOP 100 Correct testresults on newly learnd word
Also another thing about gamedesign and visual design: People love to see their progress and be able to show this. They are proud and want to enlarge whatever they have.
So, it´s a garden, which is a good idea. But at the moment I am more happy about the amount of words I learnt than about my garden (I am pretty happy actually even with this, but there is potential).
My dream would be: You can "visit" your own and other´s garden, and what you see is the following:
Every language has it´s own visual "theme", and the more words are learnt, the more flowers are there. Whole image, whole garden full with flowers = 100% of available words (not wordlists - should work with your algorithm). China would have many nice traditional wooden houses as decoration for example. The ability to put notes or awards in the picture (This is the place where I got TOP 100 / With this word I finished my first 2000 words) would also be nice, especially for visitors.
It has not to be much work: Maybe 1 generall picture per language and 3-4 different sets for the progress (0%-25%-...) and the plants are not all plants that were learned, but for example 1 plant = 20 plants learnt from 10.october - 12 october. And you can watch every word when you klick the plant.
Erm... Maybe I got lost in the details a little bit. But I hope that the generall idea still remains^^
3 Ladderboards and more visuall feedback together with more ability to show off
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Using memrise now for about a week to learn portugues (brazilian), and so far it has been really fun. Thank you for recommending it here. As a german nativ speaker it can sometimes be a bit tough to lern a new language "in english" but I understand that there is no real way around it at the moment.
I noticed a lot of TL people in the leaderboards and was wondering if the topic on this site made a significant impact on the user numbers.
As for gamedesign ideas: I think achievments are a good idea (although I dont care about them as much). I noticed something like "15 in a row correct" during one session but I dont think it is displayed later on somewhere in my profile (at least not that I have noticed). The idea to "farm" point through watering never occured to me I am an "honest" planter and harvester but from other peoples post it seems like it is a "viable strategy" (lol) so a more refined point system could make things more balanced :D .
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TL-Sweettears, started yesterday taking up german/italian/mandarin. I've dabbled with all of them a bit previously (especially german since I went to Germany twice, but I long forgot half of what I learned on my own) so I'm doing pretty good. Italian's pretty easy for me since I'm from a French background so a lot of the words look/sound the same.
hardest part for me is remembering the pinyin for mandarin, ffs. there's not much emphasis on what tone you use other than the "word#" next to the translation so it's hard to remember if you're not paying attention.
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Site's been slow to respond lately. Just now it seemed to freeze after I submitted an answer and wouldn't come back even after several minutes, so I had to close the tab.
It's worth mentioning that inconveniences and delays like this break gamers right out of the habit you're trying to get them into. The first time I get annoyed by this sort of lag, I'm just done with that session, and it'll be longer before I come back to start a new one.
The first night I tried it, it was fast and I couldn't stop marathonning word sets. Now it's slow and it feels like work.
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On November 14 2011 07:50 gregdetre wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2011 07:47 tsilaicos wrote:
i used this for a while and found it funny for a couple of days. however, they need to fix some kind of sound challenge on mandarin so there's not only pinyin/sign challenges. that would be gold. Hey there tsilaicos, It's funny you should mention that. We're prototyping a new mini-game to help learn to distinguish Mandarin tones. Would you be interested in being one of our beta testers?
I too was wishing for such a feature. I'd be willing to help assuming its not overly time intensive.
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EPT
