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Memrise Graded German sentences

  Tags: German
 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes Post Reply
24 messages over 3 pages: 1 2
delpino
Diglot
Newbie
United Kingdom
antosch-and-lin.com/Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5537 days ago

14 posts - 18 votes
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: French, Spanish, Mandarin

 
 Message 17 of 24
30 June 2014 at 9:56pm | IP Logged 
Random review wrote:
Well that's obviously where the big money is, but this is clearly a labour of love for
Delpino and as such I'd be quite surprised if he was doing this because he wants to
make lots of money. The impression I got from him, and he can correct me if I'm wrong,
is that he just wants to make a fair and sustainable income from his hard work this
past 7 years, which IMO ought to be easily possible if more people find out about what
is in fact quite a high quality product (at least for German, I haven't used it for any
other language) and if he makes his flashcard format more user friendly for people who
aren't as tech-savvy as he is. As I said to him by PM, I had looked long and hard for a
set of high quality, reliable sentences like his and, although I had found the rip-off
Memrise course, I never found his site until very recently due to a review on Ellen
Jovin's blog. By contrast Glossika's sentence audio products that are just coming out I
knew about very quickly.


Yes, you are right this is definitely a labor of love. How did you know about Glossika's prodcuts so quickly by the
way?
1 person has voted this message useful



Random review
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5542 days ago

781 posts - 1310 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German

 
 Message 18 of 24
30 June 2014 at 10:12pm | IP Logged 
delpino wrote:
Random review wrote:
Well that's obviously where the big money is,
but this is clearly a labour of love for
Delpino and as such I'd be quite surprised if he was doing this because he wants to
make lots of money. The impression I got from him, and he can correct me if I'm wrong,
is that he just wants to make a fair and sustainable income from his hard work this
past 7 years, which IMO ought to be easily possible if more people find out about what
is in fact quite a high quality product (at least for German, I haven't used it for any
other language) and if he makes his flashcard format more user friendly for people who
aren't as tech-savvy as he is. As I said to him by PM, I had looked long and hard for a
set of high quality, reliable sentences like his and, although I had found the rip-off
Memrise course, I never found his site until very recently due to a review on Ellen
Jovin's blog. By contrast Glossika's sentence audio products that are just coming out I
knew about very quickly.


Yes, you are right this is definitely a labor of love. How did you know about
Glossika's prodcuts so quickly by the
way?


Because I regularly search google for sentence collections in my target languages, I
believe they are the most important resource for breaking out of the B1 plateau for
those of us who can't find people to practice with (I think some combination of
Assimil, Michel Thomas and FSI plus tons of comprehensible input is the best way to
reach B1 in the first place).

1 person has voted this message useful



Gemuse
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 3841 days ago

818 posts - 1189 votes 
Speaks: English
Studies: German

 
 Message 19 of 24
30 June 2014 at 11:23pm | IP Logged 
Here is another easy to implement suggestion: Random review has been raving about the sentence selection, and from a brief glance, I too like the sentences.
The marketing blurb on the website, however, says nothing about this high quality content. That is, suppose I am someone who does not care about the platform, about flashcards and so on. The sentences would *still* be of high interest to me if they have been carefully chosen, which Oliver seems to have done so.
Perhaps a sample page of 30 sentences + translations might help to convey an idea about the type of sentences, and that these sentences have been chosen from practical usage to help students learn German.

I would not have even bothered to get into the website had it not been for Random Review's rave review of the *content*.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Random review
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5542 days ago

781 posts - 1310 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German

 
 Message 20 of 24
01 July 2014 at 12:46am | IP Logged 
Gemuse wrote:
Here is another easy to implement suggestion: Random review has been
raving about the sentence selection, and from a brief glance, I too like the sentences.
The marketing blurb on the website, however, says nothing about this high quality
content. That is, suppose I am someone who does not care about the platform, about
flashcards and so on. The sentences would *still* be of high interest to me if they
have been carefully chosen, which Oliver seems to have done so.
Perhaps a sample page of 30 sentences + translations might help to convey an idea about
the type of sentences, and that these sentences have been chosen from practical usage
to help students learn German.

I would not have even bothered to get into the website had it not been for Random
Review's rave review of the *content*.


The sentences are very well chosen, you're right, that's the key to what his site
offers IMO and I think you're onto something.
In the German course, the first level contains only about 250 or so sentences (I can't
remember the exact number right now) and the other 4 levels contain much more, the
second and third levels contain over 1000 each! I honestly think that putting that
first level back onto Memrise on his own account as a taster would be a good idea. 250
sentences is enough to show the quality but not enough to make an appreciable
difference to your target language.

This can hook people into the main website, because 4000 quality sentences will
make a big difference to your German (or other target language), I had learned about
1,500 when the rip-off course was deleted and had already noticed a difference.
Obviously I can't know how many of the people hooked in this way will pay for the
premium features, such as audio; but for those who can afford it, audio is always worth
paying for with language learning, and if enough free users like me start using the
site, it opens up the possibility of making money from adverts. I can't speak for
others, but I think his sentences are good enough that I would still use them if there
were ads. The chance to use the service without ads would then become another big
selling point for the premium membership.

That's how it seems to me, but I'm rubbish at business so I might be talking sh**e ha
ha. I'm sure he knows what he's doing.
1 person has voted this message useful



Cavesa
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 4768 days ago

3277 posts - 6779 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1
Studies: Spanish, German, Italian

 
 Message 21 of 24
02 July 2014 at 7:13pm | IP Logged 
I would pay a reasonable price to use your sentence deck in memrise or another platform i like. I believe that
was one of the thoughts behind memrise changes, to make it ready for introductioon of paid content. I'd
gladly pay for such a sentence collection or a collection of 15000 or 30000 most used words, a large
collection of all the conjugations etc. Unfortunately, the choice is either not using your content (my current
choice for this sentence collection), using your site, or piracy.

Why won't i use your site instead, even though i mean no offense to your admirable efforts and time put into
it:

1. I learn and maintain several languages. When it comes to things like the srs, i am happy to use a tool
usable for all of them instead of a chaos of several similar tools, each for one language. I would be excited to
get such high quality content as yours in one of the platforms i use, however. But i appreciate you offer to
upgrade all the language site for one price for the paying users, that is certainly a welcoming approach

2.no offline app. I usually have time for srs on the go. I usually don't have a wifi in a tram, in a longer queue,
at the bus stop and so on.

3. If it is not srs, than it is much less useful to me despite all the great looking content and exercises. This is a
clear advantage of anki or memrise.

4.i've looked at three of your other sites and they seem to have much less content than German. In such
cases, i just prefer to bring new content from various sources to my anki decks than to pay quite a lot for a
platform without some of anki's functions where i'd need to bring a lot of my own content anyways.


1 person has voted this message useful



Gemuse
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 3841 days ago

818 posts - 1189 votes 
Speaks: English
Studies: German

 
 Message 22 of 24
02 July 2014 at 9:40pm | IP Logged 
Cavesa wrote:

2.no offline app. I usually have time for srs on the go. I usually don't have a wifi in a tram, in a longer queue,
at the bus stop and so on.


In this age where the matra seems to be "connected all the time" and "cloud computing", let me implore budding entrepreneurs to take into consideration, when making tools, that there *are* many of us who do not have internet/data connectivity a lot of the time.

Edited by Gemuse on 02 July 2014 at 11:21pm

2 persons have voted this message useful



delpino
Diglot
Newbie
United Kingdom
antosch-and-lin.com/Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5537 days ago

14 posts - 18 votes
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: French, Spanish, Mandarin

 
 Message 23 of 24
02 July 2014 at 11:15pm | IP Logged 
Thanks Cavesa for taking the time to write feedback.

1. The way the site is works I don't see a way to get all languages under one hood. But there is actually a drop
box button to easily switch to another language at the bottom left.

2. This is true. But then again you could read the newsletter offline. Especially the customizable newsletters come
in handy. You won't have sound but for Asian language like Chinese you can still figure out how to pronounce it
with Pinyin or Zhuyin.

3. Not sure why you say there is no SRS system on the site. It's actually quite similar to Anki's system.

4. It's true that German and Chinese have more content than other languages, but then again for most beginners
there is plenty to practice on all languages.
1 person has voted this message useful



Random review
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5542 days ago

781 posts - 1310 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German

 
 Message 24 of 24
03 July 2014 at 2:04am | IP Logged 
To be fair, Cavesa, although memrise has an app you can use offline (which I do use for
some courses), it's next to useless for sentences since there's no typing test (tapping
tests and multiple choice are way too easy with sentences). That's one area where Anki
is much better than memrise.

I never figured out how to use delpino's srs, but there is one.

Some of the "bugs" in memrise are actually really helpful in the long run. Herw's a few
things I noticed when using Delpino's sentences on memrise:

1) most sentences have more than one acceptable translation but only one is graded
correct by memrise. This annoyed the hell out of me at first, in fact still does when I
type the exact correct answer but I use, say, "gerne" and the actual sentence has
"gern" and vice versa; but after a while I noticed some useful positive side effects!

For instance, "du" and "Sie" are clearly separated in my mind now. The English prompt
usually gives no clue about whether the German sentence uses the formal or informal you
and after a few hundred frustrating times typing the wrong answer because you used
"Sie" instead of "du" or vice versa, the mind starts to naturally notice which is used
and this spills over into your reading/TV. I wish I'd had this when learning the
difference between "tú" and "usted" in Spanish! The applications of this are endless,
one that spring immediately to mind is the imperfect and the indefinite in Spanish.

Another example: I've noticed I'll often say the right answer out loud yet type the
wrong one!!!! I'll say the correct sentence out loud but in typing will get a gender
wrong or forget to inflect for case. Because of the time pressure, your fingers fairly
have to dance around the keyboard (I use a tablet) and rush, whereas there's morethan
enough time to say it without rushing. This gives great feedback: if you say it wrong,
you don't know it. If you say it right but type it wrong, then you know it somewhat but
not thoroughly and would possibly get it wrong in the rush of conversation where there
are so many demands on your attention.

One final example: typos. These drove me crazy!!!!!!!!! Why should a sentence be marked
wrong (and therefore Memrise is going to show it to me again very soon) because I
accidentally typed "der Manm" instead of "der Mann". I longed for a button I
could press to tell Memrise it was just a typo. Then, I noticed something important: I
wasn't making typos in the sentences I knew well, but rather only in those I had to
think about! Because of the time pressure, the demands on my attention on those more
challenging sentences made me prone to typos. If, like me, you want to overlearn these
sentences, this so-called bug was actually a really handy feature!

These are just 3 of the many reasons why I fell in love with the combination of
Delpino's sentences on the Memrise platform.

Edited by Random review on 03 July 2014 at 2:05am



3 persons have voted this message useful



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