EPTIf these changes stick then I am not sure if I will learn much by using memrise
EDIT: That was a quick fix, the practise button is back. At least for now and I am happy again
Memrise: Learning languages with a game approach - Page 65
| Forum Index > General Forum |
|
Catbus
80 Posts
If these changes stick then I am not sure if I will learn much by using memrise EDIT: That was a quick fix, the practise button is back. At least for now and I am happy again | ||
|
spangled
United States24 Posts
Not sure about courses and learning history though but at least it's starting. I tried editing my course today, 25 words per level is apparantly not as opitmal for memorizing, as 15 words is. Made the changes but :r it appears now the learner has to re plant the new levels (w/ 15words) and start over again. | ||
MasterOfChaos
Germany2896 Posts
No shared learning history between courses, annoying split between pronunciation and writing, forces me to learn certain pronunciations because I can't unlearn/ignore them, wrong labels (asks for pronunciation, expects writing),... Pretty much unusable IMO. | ||
|
ShadowDrgn
United States2497 Posts
| ||
|
Tal
United Kingdom1014 Posts
Having said that, I'm astounded they would transfer everyone over and publicly launch (with a Guardian feature and everything), with the site in its current state. Between the various problems I don't think anyone is having a good experience, and current forum posts reflect that. When this thread first started I fell in love with Memrise, but things only seem to have gotten worse in that huge span of time. I had given up on the old site, and it looks like I'll be holding off on the new site for a while too. | ||
|
solidbebe
Netherlands4921 Posts
| ||
|
Namenlos
Germany96 Posts
. It seems like I can't even open the words one by one, maybe thats a protection against grabbing the words with a wget script. | ||
|
Scarecrow
Korea (South)9172 Posts
| ||
|
[]Phase[]
Belgium927 Posts
| ||
|
Nevermind86
Somalia429 Posts
| ||
|
YoucriedWolf
Sweden1456 Posts
No shared learning history? U srs?? Are they implementing this? | ||
|
MasterOfChaos
Germany2896 Posts
On December 02 2012 00:47 YoucriedWolf wrote: Just got forced into the 1.0... No shared learning history? U srs?? Are they implementing this? It's by design. But perhaps if enough people complain in their forums they'll change it back... | ||
|
Tal
United Kingdom1014 Posts
Ben posted a long, excellent reply to a couple of the threads criticizing the new site. If you haven't read it here it is, then I have some comments. "Thank you all very much for all of your feedback - and I am very sorry that so many of you are not enjoying the new site yet. I think that there is a sense among some of you that we have made this transition too quickly, without testing and without thinking. This is not the case. I don't want in any way to give the impression that there are no bugs in this process, or that I don't totally understand your irritation at those bugs - I do. But it seems that it might be fair to give you a bit more of an in depth description of our reasons for making the change now. This was always going to be a difficult balancing act: the Memrise beta site was the result of two and a half years of very hard work and a lot more than that in planning, research and forming of the ideas. We passionately believed in every feature that we designed built, tested and used. We know and care more deeply than anyone about those features (eg the shared dictionary, which I have, as Dave 114 says, discussed more on this thread http://www.memrise.com/thread/1284629/). We have made no changes without considering them carefully. Memrise beta was effective, but it was also incredibly complex. At the scale at which we were operating it was becoming a full time job for four people just to keep it running. To make it work with larger numbers was going to be much more technically difficult (and more expensive). And although it was effective at what it did, it was doing only a tiny fraction of what we planned for it to do. And we had no way to continue expanding into better and more effective learning tools because all of our resources were taken up on the beta site. Keeping the beta site going was simply not an option open to us. So instead we took everything that we had learned from the the beta site, both in terms of the most important features and in terms of what we personally had learned about how to structure this kind of website. We re-structured and re-architected the entire site to be able to run at much larger scale and to be much easier to navigate and to understand. We have not yet added back in all of the features that were good from the beta site, but we will add in most of them (not the shared dictionary) back in. So why have we made the transition now, before all of the features are in? As I said, this is a balancing act, and picking the right moment is always going to be hard. The key constraint for us is obviously our limited manpower. We are a small team. While half the team are taken up maintaining the old site, development is necessarily slower on the new site. So we set up all the machinery to perform the transfer of users from the old to the new site, but before we started the process, we first opened up the new site to new people coming to Memrise for the first time, and left the old users using the old site. This was the final phase of testing where we could see what the site was like to people who have not seen any Memrise before: we have rich data on how many people start learning, get engaged in learning and how they use the beta site, so we can compare very effectively with the new site. After just two weeks there were more people using the new site than using the old site. That was before we had transferred more than a handful of old users to the new site. So at that point we had more people on the new site, which was also growing faster: it was clear that it was in some sense a "better" product than the beta site. Not more complete, but more engaging and more popular with more people. At the point that we had more people on the new than the old site, we were certain that, while there would still be a difficult transition, because no-one likes to have their learning habits disrupted by outside events, the Memrise 1.0 site was now objectively of a level of quality that we could in good faith start the migration. Again, I don't want any of that to give the sense that we don't care about your problems here - we do, and we are fixing most of these issues, many of which relate specifically to the process of the transfer from beta to 1.0. So to get onto those specifics: One of the persistent issues is that there is far greater flexibility in the new site for course creators to choose the settings for the courses: direction of testing, what is displayed during tests, whether to mark strictly on accents or not etc. There have been errors in getting all of the settings in the right places on the right courses for the courses that were imported from Memrise beta. We are getting all of these fixed ASAP, and all reports are hugely appreciated. @Brock, the problem with not showing the definition when you are learning the pinyin is just that sort of bug - the setting has not been checked by the course creator (probably me) to set that info to show. Can you let me know which course you are learning (send me the link) and I will do that for you right away. I will get it done on all the Chinese courses as well ASAP. The pinyin not flashing up after correct tests on meanings is a feature that hasn't been put in to the new site yet. I agree on its importance, and we will implement it as soon as possible. @tpartlett, if you were learning the course then it should have appeared on your dashboard - did it not? Where was it? I would hugely appreciate any report of how the navigation is confusing so that we can smooth that out. @dkevinb, were all your courses in the same topic on Memrise beta? We will have a "water all" for each category on Memrise 1.0 very soon, that should help with that. I will see if we can combine separate Memrise beta courses into a single course on Memrise 1.0 - that would be much more similar to how the courses that are made on Memrise 1.0 are structured, so would be much easier to use I think. How does that sound to you? @Dave114 as mentioned in other thread, the editable alternatives will be back in the next day or so, I am really sorry for their absence at the moment - I know how annoying it is. The part of speech showing up during testing will be another setting that will come back in soon. Please do keep the feedback coming of where there are issues and we can address them right away, Best wishes, and my sincere apologies for any annoyance that you are suffering. Ben Posted by benwhately Dec 1 (8 hours ago)" After reading this, most users probably feel sympathetic to the Memrise team, and can understand why the new site is in such a bad way. You will probably be willing to give them the few extra months they need to get the new site up to the same standard as the old one. The problem is that the migration to 1.0 was presented as a huge step forward - we were given the idea that after the slowness and complexity of the beta, this would be the bright new future, that there had been months of testing and this was going to be better in every way. If instead the upgrade had been communicated along the lines of Ben's post, it would have read something like this: "Because of our financial constraints, low manpower and specialized skill-set, we are finding maintaining the beta site impossible and unsustainable, as well as being very hard to use for course creators. Our solution is to build a new site which is sleeker, more efficient, and learns from the mistakes of the last one. We think it's going to give the site a bright future, and we're excited about it. However due to the aforementioned problems, this means we will have to solve problems in new ways. Most noticeably, the powerful interconnected dictionary is going to have to be dropped, which we understand will be painful for some users. In migrating courses from one site to another, there are likely to be serious problems, and while we're trying our best, we can't guarantee all learning history will be preserved. Furthermore, because we don't have the manpower to polish this new site while maintaining the beta, after the transfer there is going to be a long period which essentially will be a new alpha/beta, as we adapt old features to the new site, and iron out new bugs. Going through these sacrifices will be worth it, because it gives the site a future, and will lead to a better site in the end. Please bear with us, and thanks for making the last beta so successful "TLDR: The new site isn't a polished 1.0, but a second beta as the team makes a more sustainable and user friendly site. It will take time, but it's the only way. This is what we should have been told. | ||
|
SHOOG
United States1639 Posts
Edit: They have you practice in a new way and it makes no sense. (In my Korean course). | ||
|
ZeroChrome
Canada1001 Posts
I don't really see any changes that have improved the site for me but I don't think it's actually any worse than the beta. They just implemented change for the sake of change. I like being able to quit courses as I had quite a few small ones of 20-30 words that I didn't need anymore; but having to wait at the score screen every single time is so annoying. | ||
|
Toadesstern
Germany16350 Posts
I tried watering some Kanji and realized I've got to type in every single reading for those with correct punctuation oO That's just not possible lol, even if I really know ALL of them I have to switch between japanese and german keyboard settings like 5 times for a vocabulary because it's not even accepting the japanese comma, semicolon or space Is it that way with all the Kanji courses or just the one I started? Guess I'll stick to normal vocabulary right now ///Edit:/// Oh and I tested the rest now as well. I'm really missing the function to click on vocabulary in my garden. I used to do that to take a look at words I'm having trouble with because I really like writing down those and learn them the old fashioned way if it turns out to be really troublesome. I don't think that's possible anymore or I haven't figured out how to do it yet but other than that I actually like the new site. Yeah it's slimmer than the old one and nothing perfect but it looks decent and no 1000ms lags. So if they keep on debugging it's going to be awesome imo. | ||
|
ShadowDrgn
United States2497 Posts
| ||
|
ShadowDrgn
United States2497 Posts
| ||
|
SpaceFighting
New Zealand690 Posts
thanks for the post! should be a good learning experience edit: i guess thanks to the above post because he/she is the reason i found the site ^_^ | ||
|
DamnCats
United States1472 Posts
On December 19 2012 19:05 ShadowDrgn wrote: Just wanted to bump this to say that they've been fixing things like crazy over the last two weeks. Memrise 1.0 is actually looking pretty good now. The old courses that were copied over from beta are still kind of wonky in some respects, but the new course creation options are so much more flexible than they used to be. I agree with this I was quite worried for the new site but they are definitely making good progress on making it better. I just wish the global leaderboard was back (unless I just can't find it) and not course specific. | ||
| ||
