Memrise Reviews 

Memrise is going to remove all community-made courses from their program. Unfortunately.
I had bought a life-time subscription for being able to use just these community-made courses offline.

When I explained my situation, they booked back the full amount of my life-time subscription fee I had bought last year.

That is a fair policy, for which I am grateful.

I've been using Memrise since May 2013 to learn Japanese and a few bits and pieces of other languages. It has been the foundation of my studies and was really useful in supporting other resources and really flexible in what you wanted to learn. I always really liked it, since I could use the community courses to learn the JLPT vocab or vocab that my textbooks used. It wasn't a one-stop shop to learn a language entirely, but it wan't intended to be and I felt like it was really good at what it did.

Unfortunately, I've now given up on using Memrise. With the Community Courses being moved to a new website and set to be deleted by the end of the year, I don't feel like there's any point me carrying on using something that's just going to disappear in a few months. I'd rather look at alternatives and start building a new routine. I've already downloaded Anki and have been playing around with it, though I've used it in the past and previously preferred Memrise to it.

I just wish I'd not bought the lifetime subscription for memrise a couple of years ago, I feel like I wasted my money.

Didn’t get the refund. Seems they are playing with me.
You buy lifetime a product and after one year they changed it and no refund granted. A shame

Memrise used to be the only language learning platform that suited my needs as a neurodivergent interested in learning around 5 languages.
Sadly new changes have consistently demonstrated:
1) poor understanding of their audience,
2) lack of regard for community content which holds years worth of free content donated to them by teachers and native speakers, and
3) by extension complete disregard for endangered languages.
The community courses were due to be removed with an indeterminate date. After much unrest in the community, they gave us a temporary page which will be removed at the end of the year, according to the CEO. It's notable that this fact is (once again) omitted when it's mentioned in the reviews below. This demonstrates the poor communication and transparency of this company.

This last year has cemented in many users minds that Memrise doesn't care about language, communication, the community, or inclusive learning styles that they used to cater to. Apparently they'll be removing the things we love to instead prsent us with tiktok videos and AI chatbots. Things we could source outside of the site if we wanted, while removing the things we can't get anywhere else and was given to them for free.
Strange choice but clearly the app isn't about language learning and community anymore, so perhaps I'm no longer the audience for this product. Extremely sad news.

so far it was a good app and i even had a paid membershi last year for 25euro/year.
now it came to an end and prices went up to 120euro/year ,that's a lot of inflation and if i read the other comments hear i can soon exspect a bad upgrade so this will probably become the same story i had with duolingo

I have been using memrise for some years now - it use to be a great app - Unfortunately now they have updated and moved the community learning lessons to a new online home - which from what i have seen so far does not work - and when i tried the AI learning trial - there was limited lessons - so nothing new for me to learn. Which considering I renewed January i feel very let down. Now the community courses have no sound.

I found the old learning software much better. It is more gamified now, but it takes more time to learn new vocabulary. The AI conversation exercises are nearly random. They have no connection whatsoever with the level of the student. I consider that part unusable and unpractical.
I am sorry I cannot be positive. The new learning interface is a serious step backwards from the pedagogical point of view.

AVOID. I got a good flow going with a good course that slowly built up competency; then suddenly it all stopped - access denied. The courses are now all user generated. Someone at Memrise decided it needed a revamp. It is now ..... Hopeless. Poor quality lessons delivered in a thoughtless way.

This site has gone from bad to worse. I rely heavily on community courses to teach my students and now they can no longer access these courses via the app. All promotions for the new look app stated “coming in the autumn “ and then they swooped in early and removed all commuity courses (from the app) without warning. I had great difficulty finding my courses again and the app functionality is now gone for these courses several months ahead of schedule

I bought a Lifetime membership. Not knowing they would change the whole thing weeks later. Now it sucks, no use, garbage. Cannot recommend it!

I am shocked. I was a happy, satisfied user. I knew there was Memrise. I knew there was this lovely app. I was using it to learn skills (for example, regions of Italy and other amazing and unique courses). There were years of YEARS there of learning. The skills and the words I was learning were saved there. It's impossible to restart: the lessons have been deleted. They no longer let me access these courses. Hours and hours, endless hours of practice. Suddenly, I accidentally pressed a button which was very big and always there. The button said "synch", it didn't say: "everything will be deleted if you press this button". Suddenly, all community courses are lost, all the content is lost. Everything is lost and now it's like I have never used this app before.
I read their FAQ. However, their FAQ was written before they made these changed. So, the FAQ was useless. So, basically, they removed all courses that I had (classical music, Lithuanian, etc) and all content, and all my learned words and skills, without any notice in just one-click!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I think that I could never imagine such a shocking experience for using their app. Worst experience I could ever imagine.. such awful experience to have everything removed and lost.. the work of YEARS... in few seconds WITHOUT NOTICE in just a click!!! Literally. Shame, I am never again going to use their services again. I would be happy to be paying them for year after year. But, I am never going to use it ever again in my life. It is truly a shock for me

Auto renewed without giving me any notice - my android phone broke 6 months ago and I replaced with an iPhone, so no longer have easy access to the Google Play store.
Memrise did not make it clear they would auto renew, and did not send any email stating they would be taking the money again, giving me no chance to log in on the browser and cancel.

As for the app itself, the Japanese was going great (that’s why I upgraded) until suddenly the next level threw in multiple Kanji with no Furigana, meaning it was very difficult to memorise without having prior knowledge of kanji (which is very advanced). Therefore I discontinued use after only a few weeks. Maybe other languages without complicated characters would be easier to master, but I am interested in learning Japanese.

Edit - Memrise have issued me a refund, so I have amended my review to 3 stars.

I've been using Memrise for my language journey and must say, it's far superior to Doulingo in my opinion. My favourite feature is learn with natives, it provides an authentic leaning experience. I've completed five German courses. The user-friendly interface and clear progression make my progress easy. The structured courses and spaced repetition ensure knowledge retention.

They earlier this week charged my credit card £49.99 for a subscription which doesn't exist (meaning I couldn't actually ask for a refund as the website functionality required a subscription in the first place...)

I have asked them ~7 times to refund me my monies, and they have not done so yet. I am having to write to them repeatedly to get any response. The only response I've had was an illogical one that my refund was processed last week, which doesn't make any sense as the payment only came out this week...they are either extremely sophisticated cash flow managers or extremely terrible customer service providers...

They have terrible customer service, simply put.

DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY -- they clearly have extremely lax and potentially fraudulent billing processes, not to mention use of customer data

And their functionality, e.g. to actually get in contact with them!, is absolutely rock bottom in terms of customer expectations.

Terrible business

They don't listen to their customers ever. They have made several ugly redesigns, removed the mute feature, removing everything that made Memrise good in the first place in order to become a terrible second-rate version of Duolingo. This website used to be amazing! Now I'm not even sure how much longer the community courses will be up. As a paying user I am becoming more and more disillusioned with Memrise as time goes on.

Memrise has a good product overall, but it has been going downhill recently. They have recently introduced new AI components which can be useful, but they seem to have disregarded the rest of their product to push these AI features over popular user features and issues that are repeatedly brought to their attention.

They operate Memrise in a very hands-off manner, and do not have much interaction with the community where a lot of us are very concerned with the longevity of the service currently due to repeated cutting of features and services, and rumors of major layoffs that Memrise refuses to address.

Recently, the community forum was removed without warning by Memrise, removing hundreds of hours of user content without a chance to save this information.

The AI voices they are now adding to certain words and phrases, while acceptable, are notably worse than the human voice acted voices that are on other words.

Overall, the service is gradually declining and Memrise is ignoring user criticisms in chase of profits, or at least that is the impression they are giving off.

The current product is acceptable and is a great resource, but they do not give me much confidence that it will remain that way, and won't leave me stranded trying to find another learning resource after I've already spent a lot of money and time at Memrise.

I truly want Memrise to succeed, and for them to succeed, they need to interact with and address user complaints, not just user praises.

Edit: As of a few days ago, they re-opened the community forums for 30 days to allow the saving of information that is needed from it. Review still stands at 1 star because this should have been allowed in the first place via an advance notice of the forum shutdown instead of a last minute response. This is the bare minimum expected of a responsible company, and it shows that the userbase is an afterthought to Memrise, not their primary concern.

The content is great but alas, like a lot of technology deployments these days, let down by poor software that obviously hasn't been tested. the French language course freezes, hangs, volume disappears and text for answers doesn't match the question. Working in software development for many years, I would be embarrassed if I was responsible for this. No notice taken of bugs reported.

Had Memrise for over a year and enjoyed it very much.

Okay for vocabulary, but bad customer service.

I think that the vocabulary on offer is pretty much fine to get started, being mostly useful, commonplace words. The system of spaced repetition is also useful.

However, the intermediate and advanced sections are not as good, and I find that it really struggles with languages which use a different script such as Japanese, Chinese, or Arabic.

The customer service is also not very good at all. When trying to discuss issues with the billing on my account, I received only automated responses and am still waiting for a human operator to contact me.

Memrise is good for what it does, which is a flashcard application. I heard great reviews about anki but the learning curve is steep. I was using the free version earlier and upgraded to paid version last black friday and the user experience is way better. I am still working through the french lesson, and compared to other apps, it is not that useful, well, better than nothing. Its real strength is really as flashcard app, where you plug in the cards that you want to study.