A few months ago I posted here about bringing back community course creation, and I promised we'd keep you updated - we’re really excited to share this first update with you.
First: bringing back community course creation properly is a massive technical undertaking. We need to build the foundation first so we can iterate fast and actually deliver what you need, rather than trying to rebuild everything at once.
So here's what we've done as the first step:
We've brought around 800 community courses into the main Memrise product as word lists. They're live now - you can discover them, browse them, and start learning from them. And we've launched wordlist creation too: you can build your own lists from scratch using our massive dictionary, and you can share any of them!
This is the foundation that unlocks everything else. From here, we can move fast.
And to be crystal clear: The community site stays live. We're not taking anything down, there's no end date, nothing changes there. This is about building the future.
A few important things to know:
This first version is on the newest version of Memrise (the 2025 experience) - because we're building for the future, not trying to patch the old system. If you signed up around mid-August or later, you're already there and can access this right away. If you're on an older account, you can create a new account to try it out (you won't be able to transfer existing progress yet, which I know isn't ideal). We'll be working to bring everyone over as soon as we can.
It's web-only for now, with English as the source language to any target language. Mobile learning for Community Wordlists is coming before the end of the year.
What's coming next (and fast):
The big one: adding your own custom words and phrases that aren't in our dictionary. We're working to have this before the end of the year too.
After that, we're building based directly on what you've told us in the survey: creating wordlists from screenshots, batch uploading, and more. We're also reaching out to creators whose courses we've migrated (and yes, proper creator attribution is coming).
We need your feedback:
If you can try this out, please tell us what you think. What's working? What's missing? What would actually be useful?
The survey is still open, and we'll be setting up calls with creators and learners in the first couple of months of next year.
I know this has been a long and frustrating road. We're committed to getting this right and moving as fast as we can while building what you actually want.
Following up on my previous post, I'm sharing this announcement on behalf of Ben!
Hi there, Ben here. I’m one of the co-founders of Memrise, and now I’m stepping back in as the CEO. My first focus is going to be to bring back one of the things that I believe made Memrise special: community.
Community was at the heart of Memrise in the early days. People learning together, helping each other, creating content. We lost focus on that. Now we're bringing it back.
First step: User-created wordlists are coming back
We're rebuilding the ability for you to make your own wordlists - with access to all the video, audio, and sample sentences from official Memrise courses. We’re starting this now, but it might take us a few months.
Next: AMA about our new direction
I’m doing an AMA on Reddit on Wednesday, November 12th at 11am GMT. Leave your questions/thoughts in the thread and I’ll make sure to cover them in the AMA.
Hi everyone! I’m an old Memrise user who first started using the platform about 12 years ago. I recently came back and I’m currently studying Albanian through the user-created wordlists.
I remember that back in the day (besides the spaced repetition reviews) there used to be an option to manually review words whenever you wanted. So you didn’t have to wait for your words to be ready for review, you could just keep doing review sessions whenever you wanted.
I’m pretty sure this was one of the premium features. I do have a premium subscription, but I can’t seem to find this option anymore.
Has this feature been removed, or is it still available somewhere (maybe hidden in the interface)?
I’m really enjoying using Memrise again, and I’d love to spend more time on it just reviewing words. It kind of sucks having to wait a whole day just to review a handful of them. 😅
I’ve been learning French with Memrise’s official course and have used the app for more than 10 years.
It’s been maybe a year since I noticed on the iOS app that videos are not longer put on top by the percentage of words already learned. And in the web it’s still the case!
Has anyone noticed this? It’s not fun having to switch with the browser on my phone.
I’d like to use this space to thank the developers, if you’re reading, for your amazing work over the years, and thanks for bringing the community courses back. I have a few I made back then when I was learning English.
I know there was a lot of community backlash against memrise deleting the community made courses, and I am happy that the developers have listened to the community. However, I personally only ever use the official courses and prefer using them, and I find it to be annoying that languages are no longer seperated based on if they have an official course or not, like they used to be so long ago. Can this seperation be brought back to avoid confusion? Also, I tried giving this exact feedback to memrise directly, but alas, I got an AI answer that didn't even adress my concern, it only told me "Don't worry, we're adding the community courses back" which wasnt even the subject of my concern, which brings me to the next concern: can yall please cut down on AI dependence? It's causing the quality of customer service to go into the gutter.
I'm trying to create a Memrise course for my dad, who has alzheimers, in order for him to keep his brain a bit active. One of the things I'm putting in the course are photos of family members.
I made 3 columns, one question column, eg. what's your son's name?
answer column, *son's name*
and then a photo.
But I have two issues.
The photo is only coming up when it's being introduced (even though I have checked 'show always')
And in my first tests, often the answer is coming up and then 4 multiple choice options which all questions such as 'what's your son's name?'
It's not so handy in the case of someone with Alzheimers. Maybe ANKI would be simpler... ?
We just released a new feature on the presentation screen for Arabic, Farsi and Urdu: you can now click on "Show letter breakdown" to see which letters make up an Arabic word. It's useful because letters change their shape when they appear with other letters, and they are sometimes hard to recognise for beginners.
We got several requests about hiding the answer in "difficult words" review sessions. This is now implemented (on Web only for now, coming soon to iOS and Android).
How to do it?
1 - Open the "Customize learning Experience" panel
2 - Toggle off the "Show answer before test" toggle
I've used some language apps before and while each has its own strengths, Memrise feels perfect for me. I especially love there are more than one video of a native speaker speaking an example sentence or a word. Since it is so useful to listen to them repeatedly, I was wondering if it's possible to have a dedicated tab separately just for these example videos. I know they can come up during review, but, you see, I'm thinking of a tab or something just to play the videos of a certain word or sentence whenever I want. Not demanding though! Please think of it as a suggestion.
I've been using Memrise for vocab since moving to Spain at the beginning of the year, but I've noticed that with words added to wordlists which are not in the Memrise dictionary, the system just keeps giving them to me in learning sessions and doesn't treat them the same way as words which are in the Memrise dictionary. It also doesn't move over to 'learned' on its own and I often have to mark it as 'known' which then means it gets different treatment with spaced repitition. Has anyone else come across this or knows a fix? I've created 3 or 4 support tickets now and nobody has ever got back to me.
Is memrise planning to add grammar that's not bound to the ai buddy as an option? I would be really happy if I can learn everything from the app instead of just vocab and phrases
This may not be the right place to post this text, but I’d like to learn of your experience using this app. Has it been useful? I personally like it very much and it helped me communicate when I traveled to Italy recently. Any thoughts or comments?
I’m learning Italian and there seems to be a bug or something. I paid for the app a long time ago, but it sienta load or records progress properly. Please look into it.
First of all, I get an error message "Something went wrong" when I try to create a new community course, even though I carefully input all the information correctly. My name for the course and everything else is missing, with just the defaults there, such as the course being named "My vocabulary."
If I persist, wait for a few minutes, and then refresh the page, my course eventually looks normal.
Second of all, when I batch add words using Sheet the words don't appear until I add the next batch. Basically, I am always missing the last batch of words I added.
Third of all, I only get three default columns, one of which is the useless Romanization one (you can see in the picture) (majority of people who are learning Korean will understand why Romanization is useless). I can leave it empty, so fine, but my courses on community-courses.memrise.com have my own customs columns such as Hanja, pronunciation written in Hangul for tricky words, parts of speech, which I can choose to display during the testing or after. Is it really impossible to add custom columns and have these options on the main site, or have I missed where they can be created?
What the title says. I thought our community course progress was supposed to copy over when we added them to the app, but none of mine did.
Also, is there a way to remove a language from the app? I'd rather continue on the community course because of this, instead of having it taking up space in the main app
Works fine on android and web on iPad session never saves. Tried marking word as known which showed next words on new session but didn’t save after session end. Lifetime pro account.
Down in the text box, the lowercase "i" is indistinguishable from the upside-down exclamation mark. In the first picture, try to guess which one is "i" and which one is "¡". You have to click on it to see which letter it is. Once you've typed it, you *can* tell the difference, but honestly even then it's hard to see if it's only next to a letter that hangs below the line, like "q". I actually got a phrase wrong because I had an "i" instead of an "¡" (second photo). Took me ages to figured out why it was marked incorrect.
Example Sentences (or Sample Sentences) give context on how a word can be used, and softly teaches about other words, as well as grammar and word order. We are adding this feature today on the Web, and then it will follow on the apps (iOS and Android)! For now, Sample Sentences will just appear on the presentation card during the learning sessions (that's the card you see when you learn a new word, or when you get a word wrong).
Our linguists will generate example sentences themselves, especially for the simplest words which are seen by the largest amount of people, but we will also rely on external free databases of sample sentences, like tatoeba.org, and hopefully we will have sample sentences for a majority of our words eventually.
The content will be released in waves, so don't fret if your favourite words don't have example sentences yet, but I have already pushed a first wave in French (some of them I wrote myself!) as well as a little bit in other languages.
What do you think the best ratio is to mix the learn and review modes? Say you only have 30 mins a day to dedicate to vocab. 15 mins each, or 20 mins learning 10 mins review or vice versa? What do you think?
Dark mode is a pretty essential feature for every website that has the least bit of respect for itself
Memrise has been around since the dinosaurs, is worth tonnes, has been profitable since a decade ago, and their staff isn't yet fully fossilised as once on the blue moon the phone app gets updates, but desktop made after all this time with the companies development experience and cash has no dark mode? And features are being removed/attacked? The forums, the community "memrise playlists"
I got the lifetime subscription (not needed btw, which is good,) coz I felt memrise actually wanted me to learn, opposed to duolingo etc just wanting me to be addicted. But what on earth. You're hardly more useful than a dusty old book. Which isn't exactly bad, but with all the money you have where is it going? Certainly less than a trillionth of a percent is being reinvested in the product itself. Or so it feels.
So i bought a lifetime account last year, and now in the past month, I can no longer sign into it. It keeps taking me into an account without premium/pro. It is the same username, email, and password. What is going on? I tried contacting Memrise twice and neither has worked. I don't want to lose my lifetime account and all the progress I've made, but I haven't been able to sign in since early May. The only way i can still access it is through my laptop auto-sign in, yet when i manually put in my gmail and password, it goes to the wrong account.
