Hi Everyone,
I am Steve Toy, Memrise’s CEO. Ultimately, I am responsible for what happens here, both the good and the bad.
I am dropping in to own up to the recent missteps I have made in communicating with all of you about the evolution of Memrise. Everyone here at Memrise and I listen to what you all have to say on this and many other channels. Clearly, I am not responding well enough to eliminate the confusion you are all experiencing. For that, I apologize.
If I were to attempt to boil down all that we are doing here at Memrise into the fewest possible words, it might look something like this…
To help you, our users, truly learn a language, we need to give you the ability to…
- Practice hearing the words you are learning so you can decode them when you hear them in real life, spoken by native speakers, including the reality of their accents and truncations.
- Practice using the words you are learning to communicate successfully with others.
If we don’t do this, we will continue depositing you all into real-world situations with an incredible vocabulary but no ability to actually use the words you have learned because you have had no chance to practice.
Over the last 18-24 months, we have used a host of new AI technologies to create features that give you the ability to hear and use the words you are learning with, among other things, the integration of YouTube videos and LLM-driven chatbots that can talk with you 24/7 without a lick of human judgment and infinite patience.
However…to deliver these features, we have had to standardize our dictionaries.
We also rely on real-time advanced AI services, which makes offline mode for many of our features impossible.
This 👆 is where the fork in the road has occurred. This is the root cause of the pain you are all dealing with. I have failed to explain to you and all of our users that we cannot deliver these next-generation language learning technologies while maintaining tens of thousands of dictionaries.
Memrise and I have no desire to see all of your work and wordlists disappear into the ether.
Your progress in Memrise Official courses will make the transition to the new experience, though it will be visualized very differently.
We can’t port your user-created lists to our new system.
We can help you find those lists a new home.
Here are some of the things we can do in this regard…
- We will preserve your lists while alternatives are explored. We aren’t going to delete your lists any time soon and without lots and lots of notice.
- We will help coordinate the various creators who are considering building something else. Some of you here have expressed an interest in doing so, and users in other channels have also spoken of doing something, one of which can be seen at https://mylittlewordland.com/
- You have mentioned in these conversations that you are considering a Discord server. If you do, we can provide free access to our chatbot (MemBot) on your server for a limited period to get things going. This would give you something you don’t have now in the legacy Classic and Community offerings that are the subject of this conversation.
I will happily consider other ways to help if there are ideas I haven’t imagined.
While here, I want to give you more info about the immediate issue, where the app tossed you into our new experience and then let you back into the legacy experience. This happened because we started a migration process and then stopped it because of the confusion it was causing.
We will restart that process next week after making a few adjustments to how the process works.
We are listening to you all and the pain that this is causing. We are not ignoring you, though it might seem like it now. We want to do everything we can to ease that pain.
We are also listening to our users who are frustrated by the experience of having a great vocabulary but an inability to use the language they are learning.
The vast majority of our users tell us they want to be able to navigate Paris, talk to their partners' families, or understand Bad Bunny when he is signing.
We are evolving Memrise to help our users realize their desired goal of being able to use the words they are learning. This is what the new experience helps our users accomplish. We are going to keep pressing in that direction.
As we do, I hope we can find ways to help those of you here with different goals accomplish them with a new solution.
With sincere apologies for the confusion I have caused,
Steve
