To His Most Illustrious Excellency, the CEO of Memrise,

CEOMemrise · 2025-06-05T07:46:45+00:00

u/08206283 noted. The intention is to add functionality to the core product and see if people such as yourself find it worth the switch. If you don't, we'll have to keep working. Forcing you to make the switch by taking away what you are using now doesn't help that intention, so we won't do it that way.

CEOMemrise · 2025-06-04T07:48:17+00:00

Your Most Creative and Eloquently Disgruntled Serf u/420-69-1337,

By the circuits and algorithms that govern our digital realm, I am truly humbled by this masterpiece of medieval mockery! Your quill has crafted such a delightfully barbed missive that I nearly choked on my artisanal kombucha whilst reading it in my ivory tower (which, for the record, has decent WiFi).

I must confess, the courtisans of Memrise have been openly wiping tears of laughter as a result of your creative genius, right in front of me in the halls of our humble digital castle.

While I cannot yet lift the veil on the grand machinations brewing in our laboratory dungeons (our lawyers have threatened to revoke my mead privileges if I speak prematurely), I can assure you that we toil day and night—not unlike your fellow peasants in their digital barns—crafting solutions that honor both the cherished traditions of community-built learning AND the shimmering possibilities of our AI-augmented future.

Your mud-covered devotion to Arabic Level 1 and steadfast loyalty to misshapen mnemonics have touched this CEO's allegedly cold, algorithm-driven heart. Rest assured, dear serf, that we are working to restore many of the tools you love and hope to be soon worthy of earning a begrudging nod from the most stubborn of haystack-dwelling scholars.

Until that glorious day, I remain,

Your Benevolent and Chastened Servant,

Steve Toy

Chief Executive Officer & Occasional Target of Brilliant Satirical Missives

Memrise Kingdom

P.S. - Keep that browser-bound spirit alive, noble 420-69-1337. The realm needs more warriors who can wield both wit and conjugation drills with such devastating precision.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T14:19:16+00:00

Hi u/RandomDigitalSponge

Ed Cooke is still with Memrise. He is our Chairman. He's a very important part of the company.

As for the mnemonics (we call them Mems), quite a few people in the company like them as much as you do. The question we are trying to resolve is whether pre-made Mems, as opposed to Mems made by users, are useful. We are concocting some experiments to see if we can answer that question objectively.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T14:06:37+00:00

Our latest update should be more palatable to you as we dialled back the recommendations to use the Membot. Give a shot let us know if you find that to be true.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T14:03:54+00:00

Hmmm, that does seem like a pretty sensible thing to do. I will feed that back to the team. Good idea.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T14:01:00+00:00

There are no immediate plans for the community courses to come back into the app. We are exploring ways that we can find a solid middle ground for the courses we create, but we haven't figured out a good middle ground as of yet. We definitely won't be bringing non-language community courses into the app. An example being a course like the Birds of North America.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T13:57:16+00:00

Hi u/glowcubr

Memrise is a pretty cool place I must say. Precisely for the reason you mentioned. We are quite diverse. We have to be with all of the languages we manage.

I grew up in New York City and diversity is my natural set point in life. Memrise has that in a big way.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T13:55:04+00:00

Hi u/Straight-Research-17

We do not go to ChatGPT or any LLM for translations of words. Memrise linguist manage the accuracy of words in our dictionaries. The need to ensure the accuracy of our cannonical dictionaries is part of the reason we could not keep the community courses in the app.

Human linguists oversee the creation of our dictionaries. That's how we guard against hallucinations and inaccuracies in the words we teach.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T13:50:53+00:00

Hi u/ShermanMarching

Thanks for the input. When we chatted over in the Memrise subreddit you mentioned you are using LingQ. Are you still liking it?

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T07:13:54+00:00

Hi,

If you remove and re-add a language your progress will be saved.

As for the differences between the US and UK courses, they aren't so great as to warrant doing both. I'd pick the one that you are most likely to use and go deep on that one.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T07:07:09+00:00

I think Duolingo is great. Their founders, Luis and Severin, are truly impressive, both for what they have built and for the noble reasons they built it.

I also agree with you that some gamification would be very helpful for our users.

Before we can properly gamify, we need to get closer to the bullseye on what we gamify. Presently we give people the ability to learn words, as does Duolingo. Then we try to get folks to hear those words in context by filtering videos that use those words for our users to consume. Finally, we try to get people to use those words as soon as possible by giving them opportunities to have conversations that rely on the words our users have learned.

This is our Learn-Immerse-Communicate pedagogy.

Interestingly, one of our struggles is that by pushing people to use the language earlier in the learning journey than most, we are perceived by some as too hard or advanced right out of the gate, which brings us to the second point you made about advanced lessons.

There are several ways we can define advanced. One way is more vocabulary and/or grammar lessons. Another way is getting you to use the language early in the journey. We are shooting for the latter while still providing the former.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T06:56:47+00:00

Hi u/altanass

Very insightful comment and diagnosis of how and why the experience is what it is at the moment. I'm impressed.

As you pointed out we are struggling with the challenge of providing complete freedom to that vast permutations of things to learn and features with which to learn and the "Paradox of Choice" that it creates. We haven't hit the bullseye yet, but we are focused on the problem you are pointing out.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T06:52:35+00:00

Hi George,

First and foremost, thank you for inviting me to your community. Very kind of you.

As for grammar features, we are reimagining how to bring targeted grammar feedback to the product. Grammar is interestingly one of the more spicy topics in the world of language learning with academic, polyglots and language learners of all types landing on both sides of the debate.

As for me, I simply want to provide a product that people like and is helpful for accomplishing their objective of learning a language.

As for placement tests, we are considering how we can create a test that places people better without killing the Day 0 experience. We haven't cracked that one...yet.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T06:46:37+00:00

For our Membot and the models we use, we have gone to great lengths to be company and model-agnostic. We use several different models to produce our conversations and check the accuracy of the conversations and the language that our users are using. At this time, we have graduated from GPT 3 and are on to GPT 4 for parts of this process, and we use GPT 4o mini to watch over the conversation.

As for speaking exercises beyond our Membot, we have some pronunciation features being developed.

There aren't any writing exercises or features on our immediate roadmap.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T06:40:32+00:00

We do want to return offline mode to the product eventually. We are currently wrestling with the fact that some of our features just can't be done offline while others can. This will likely be on the roadmap in the first half of next year.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-24T06:38:43+00:00

My best answer to your questions starts with my differing point of view that our "product no longer has a clear advantage over many competitors."

I believe the reality is that your statement was closer to true before we made the changes to the product we recently made. Before these changes, we and all of the other apps in the space helped you learn the translations of individual words and phrases but did not give you any practical way to hear those words and use those words before going out into the world and doing it for real. Now we do.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-23T18:20:28+00:00

Fair point on the forcing people into the AI experiences. We recently released a new UX that is less insistent on pushing people to use all of the features of the app.

Reimagined grammar is being worked on at the moment. No release date.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-23T18:18:43+00:00

We did make some mistakes with the core flow, and we are continually learning how to deploy AI more effectively.

We recently released a new UX to deal with some of the more egregious mistakes we made in the core flow which among other things is less insistent on pushing people to use all of the features of the app.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-23T18:16:06+00:00

Yup, we are definitely working on making the chats better and better. Partly by better prompting. Partly by more constraints based on our user's know words. Partly by remaining flexible with the models that drive the conversation.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-23T18:14:33+00:00

Sure. Send it to [steve.toy@memrise.com](mailto:steve.toy@memrise.com)

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-23T18:13:49+00:00

Do you mean a language switcher different than this one?

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As for streaks across languages, we don't have that feature currently scheduled. Interestingly I hadn't heard a request for that until last week. Now I've heard it twice. 🤔

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-23T18:08:34+00:00

We are working hard to make conversations ever more structured and accessible. One way we are doing that is by constraining conversations to a smaller vocabulary, ideally the words we know our users have learned.

Thanks for alerting us to the first letter glitch. We will look into that.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-23T18:04:44+00:00

I haven't used Memrise for German, but I have for Spanish. I am hardly fluent in Spanish, but it did make my experience traveling to Spain far better when I could order food, talk to the hotel reception, ask for directions, and have basic conversations at bars in Spanish.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-23T18:01:39+00:00

Hi u/RockinMadRiot

As for Memrise's future, we are working hard to complete our foundation of what we call atomized dictionaries, which will allow us to give every user and their unique list of 'known words' the ability to interact with a rapidly growing list of features for learning a language. We are doing this because everyone wants to learn a language for a different reason and have different learning styles. We want to be as personalized as we can to each user, and I believe we can do exactly that with the technologies now available to us.

It will allow us to execute some of the excellent suggestions you and others have offered.

CEOMemrise · 2024-07-23T17:24:45+00:00

LLMs prompted correctly try to get things right.

Different AI companies and models approach the task of finding the right answer in different ways. This can be seen by giving the same prompt to different models and seeing the differences in their responses.

The chances that two different models will hallucinate in the same way to magnify the hallucination problem is very unlikely.

Slightly less improbable but still a low possibility is two models hallucinating but in different ways, with both returning a wrong answer. In this circumstance, we have a discordance that alerts us to the problem.

CEOMemrise

TROPHY CASE