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1. last edited September 8, 2012
Comprehensive Memrise Tips and Tricks
There’s more to memrise than meets the eye!
Are you aware of the official FAQ explaining all basic concepts of memrise
and the excellent unofficial user guide? This compilation of tips and tricks,
collected in the forums and in personal experience, repeats some frequently
occurring issues and reveals many undocumented features. Before you post
in the “how to...” or “feature suggestions” forums, you should search in the
three completely different types of documentation.
Features marked by a star are probably obsolete or solved entirely dif-
ferent in memrise 1.0. Since i do not work for memrise, there is nothing i
can do about memrise bugs and missing features but telling memrise about
the problem and people about workarounds. Feedback concerning errors,
feature changes or features i didn’t mention is highly appreciated. I can edit
this PDF file by replacing it on Speakerdeck without deleting and recreating
the forum post.
The best way of reading this antediluvian PDF is downloading and print-
ing it. Unfortunately, links are not supported by Speakerdeck, but the
links work in Acrobat Reader when you download my original PDF file from
Speakerdeck. Links also work on slideshare, however, the PDF text quality
is poor on slideshare. Please tell me if you know which slideshare clone is
the best.
I hope this document enriches your memrise experience.
Best regards, azrael42
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2. Memrise beta issues fixed with memrise 1.0
1. *Help! I cannot edit my own definitions. You will be able to edit
your definitions again, as soon as memrise 1.0 is released. If you can’t
wait that long, read the user guide on how to become a curator who
can edit words of his topic. For some background on the controversial
introduction of this feature read for instance this thread, the posts by
benwhately reflect the official memrise opinion.
2. *The water all button does weird things! Until memrise 1.0
is released, this issue can be solved by the elegant and simple Google
Chrome Add-on ”Memrise button”. It essentially provides a water-all-
wilting-plants-of-the-topic-with-the-most-wilting-plants-button. If you
are learning many courses, installing Chrome is justified by this add-
on alone. Apart from that, Chrome seems to be the favorite browser of
memrise an, in general, browsing with Chrome, Safari or Opera seems
to be significantly faster than Firefox and Internet Explorer (according
to my personal experience; can someone confirm this?).
3. *Private courses will be possible in memrise 1.0. Currently, the only
way to create an almost invisible course is to precede the course name
by an underscore e.g. ” mycourse”. However, the words of the course
still belong to the public wiki and can only be edited by curators.
Underscore courses are not linked anywhere except for the list of the
5 most recent courses.
4. *Pronunciation/Description field learning does not seem to work
at all, at least in the topics i am learning. I assume that we have to
wait for memrise 1.0 which introduces a flexible way of choosing the
learning fields.
5. *When can i finally influence the direction of the typing tests?
In memrise 1.0.
6. Where is the edit button in the forum? An edit button has
been requested already 1,314 times, but i did not forget the star in
front of the item. I heard that the basic functionality of memrise
1.0 has priority and the forum is improved “later”. As a temporary
solution i suggest activating browser spell checking (especially when
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3. you are posting in a non-native language) and accept the remaining
typos (everybody does them) or repost and delete the erroneous post
or hammer your keyboard with your fists (Disclaimer: The author is
not responsible if the keyboard is destroyed in the process). Keep in
mind though that deleting a post does not delete the mail notification
in the inbox of the people involved in the thread. And please don’t
delete opening posts containing answers useful for other people since
all answers will disappear with the opening post.
Features frequently asked for that already exist
7. What do curators and moderators do and how can i join the
club? See user guide.
8. How can i review mems when i answered correctly? Use the
down arrow trick : after submitting a correct answer, you have approx-
imately one second to quickly press the down arrow in order to show
the complete flashcard of the word. This can be used to review sam-
ple sentences, extra info, etymology or alternative definitions (press
“s” for “show more”) of words you already know or to upvote a mem
after you know that it worked. Mems are currently inaccessible when
your answer was almost correct (yellow) which doesn’t make any sense
(@memrise, please fix this issue).
9. Is there a way to get rid of very easy or very difficult words?
Yes, when you mouse over the black bar in the top left while learning
a word, a context menu opens containing the option ”ignore item”.
Words can be unignored any time under the ”Seeds (New words)” tab.
10. How do i plant more than five seeds in one go? Choose more
”learning options, new words only”, go through the words and press
stop whenever you like. Automatically stops after 50 words. You still
need 6 further correct answers for each word until it can be harvested,
but it works well in combination with the ignore button if the course
contains many easy words. However, when learning new and possibly
difficult words, memrise obviously recommends to plant 10 seeds by
following the ”Plant seeds” routine twice and continue to grow the 10
seeds completely.
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4. 11. Multiple choice tests are too easy because the choices are
completely unrelated. The multiple choice engine prefers words
with identical part of speech as answer choices, which makes the “part”
field particularly useful for course creators in non-lingual or grammar
topics. However, this preference does not always seem to work espe-
cially when watering with the ”Memrise button”.
12. How can i bookmark a course for future learning? Start learn-
ing the course, plant one seed and press the stop button when the
second word is displayed. Now the course will be displayed in your
garden without interfering with the memrise button watering.
13. How do i know which answer to type when different words
have the same definition? It the definitions are completely identi-
cal, the answers of both flashcards are accepted as correct. You can use
the down arrow trick (8.) to check which flashcard was actually pre-
sented to you. Consequently, very similar, but not identical definitions
of different words should be avoided. The best solution that has been
suggested so far is making definitions clearly unambiguous by adding
a short extra info in parenthesis or by adding multiple translations
separated by comma or semicolon.
14. What does the underscore in the alternative definitions mean?
Alternative answers preceded by an underscore (” 2ndanswer”) are ac-
cepted as correct alternative answer, but they are only shown in the
edit page of the flashcard and not when pressing ”show more” while
learning.
15. How can i conveniently upload a long list of words? Only
curators can upload spreadsheets and the procedure is explained in
this sub-FAQ. Keep in mind that several of the main languages have
been flooded with ten thousands of wrong entries and almost identical
double entries. Thus, please be careful with this feature even if you
are a curator, correcting or adapting 5000 words is not entertaining for
anyone. Make sure that you use a reliable source containing (almost)
no errors and (almost) no entries that already exist and format the
spreadsheet thoroughly according to the conventions of the topic in
question. If your language has no conventions yet, try to establish
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5. conventions by adapting the standard Mandarin conventions or the
Spanish FAQ 2.0.
16. Memrise has plenty of forums. As you may or may not have
noticed, there are, apart from the global forum (click Community and
then Forums in the top main menus), an individual forum for every
topic, a discussion tab for every course and for every individual word.
17. Private messages are not yet supported, the possibly best way to
reach another memrise user is posting in his garden wall (on his profile
page) and the user will receive a mail notification. Note that this is
not a private message, though.
18. You can improve long and sophisticated forum posts by up-
loading PDF files or Word Documents on slideshare and embedding
the document as explained in 21.
Audio, Pictures, Videos and Slide shows
19. How can i upload audio? Currently, only curators and moderators
can upload audio in the form of recorded audio files. Improved web-
based recording features have been announced to be implemented after
the basic features of memrise 1.0 are properly set up. However, there
is a way to mass upload audio with the help of the memrise staff.
20. *How can i download audio? This feature is really well hidden at
the moment. Open the source code of the page and search for ”mp3”
(or other audio formats) to get the URL of the audio!
21. How can i embed videos in mems? The syntax is embed:URL
and it also works in forums. Note that you have to enter the URL as
external link, e.g.
embed:http://youtu.be/TVp8mPg7Z44?t=2m54s,
and the embed command automatically creates the embedding HTML
code (you need to press F5 once). The embedding trick with
external links also works with Slideshare, Speakerdeck and
possibly any similar website!
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6. 22. *How can i use pictures in word definitions? The syntax is
img:URL. Although this works with both external and internal URLs,
it seems to be preferred by memrise if you upload the picture on the
memrise server by opening any forum/discussion page, clicking ”Start
a new discussion” and following the ”Upload photo” button dialog.
This produces a link that can be copied and pasted directly.
23. *Using text and pictures in the same definition. Pictures in def-
initions work in all topics, not only ”famous people” or ”art history”.
It’s even possible to combine text and picture both in the ”question”
and in the ”answer” field. In the second case, you need to add a pure
text version as alternative answer, look at this flashcard. The feature
can be used for instance to create fancy quiz courses like this one.
24. Free picture sources. LukeMeister posted this excellent list of free
pictures sources which includes a short and interesting discussion of
license issues. He recommends Compfight and i like to add that Wiki-
media Commons worked very well for me for all the non-lingual topics.
If you wonder whether license issues are important for memrise or not,
you should note that pictures are used commercially in memrise 1.0
and that memrise might get into trouble if thousands of anonymous
users violate copyrights. So far, memrise seems to be not nearly as
strict as wikipedia, but i found reading wikipedia’s image policy very
enlightening. Clicking on wikipedia pictures is generally a good way
to learn about free picture arguments and sources, for instance i found
maps-for-free (google maps is not free). Of the US government insti-
tutions, the CIA World Fact Book and the NASA library seem to be
particularly resourceful concerning free images.
25. Picture size. Since i read about problems of mobile users download-
ing 5 MB pictures used in memrise definitions, it’s probably a good
idea to upload smaller versions of pictures (as long as memrise doesn’t
offer an advanced feature to deal with this issue). A good compromise
seems to be 800 pixels maximum which seems to the standard format
of wikipedia and produces jpg files between 50 and 150 KB and occa-
sionally a 500 KB png file. Actually, i started a well hidden discussion
about this issue here and have no feedback yet.
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7. How strict is the answer evaluating of typing tests?
26. Text in parentheses in word definitions does not need to be typed,
even if the parentheses are in the middle of the text. If you want
to enter the text nevertheless, you need to include the parentheses as
well.
27. A semicolon or a comma in an answer separates two alternative
answers, i.e. both sides are accepted as correct. If you want to enter
both, the order of the words needs to be correct. In the alternative
answer field, you can use the semicolon to enter multiple alternative
definitions in one go, which will be separated automatically when you
press F5.
28. Accents. It is not necessary to type accents in order to receive a
correct answer currently. It has been leaked that the user is supposed
to have a personal option in memrise 1.0 concerning the strictness of
accent testing.
29. Capitalization is ignored in all the topics that i know of.
30. Punctuation. At the moment, punctuation is almost completely ig-
nored by the memrise engine. For instance, ”AD” is correct for ”A.D.”
and ”its” for ”it’s”. A notable exception is the hyphen. ”Guinea Bis-
sau” is wrong for ”Guinea-Bissau” and vice versa, however ”Guinea -
Bissau” is treated by the engine as if it were ”Guinea Bissau” with-
out hyphen. The hyphen “-” is correct for the en dash “–” (recom-
mended for number ranges), but, possibly unintentionally, not vice
versa. Please tell if i missed something or if the engine has changed in
the meantime.
Keyboard shortcuts
31. Speed learning. If you quickly press “Enter” twice when submitting
an answer, you move immediately to the next answer. Note that you
might significantly reduce the memorizing effect by going too quickly.
Memrise even implemented the feature that the following answer is
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8. ”locked” for a second, in case you press enter twice in the wrong sit-
uation. Sometimes, giving up quickly on an answer by submitting an
empty answer might be more efficient than intensely trying to remem-
ber the answer until the time has expired. If you can hardly remember
a word, one or two extra short-term repetitions may save you repeti-
tions in the long run.
32. Multiple choice tests can be answered by pressing the numbers on
the keyboard. Numbers on the ”numpad” do not work (yet), but the
feature has been requested by several users.
33. A list of shortcuts can be found here. A shortcut for ignoring items
is not supported on purpose to avoid accidental ignoring (although i
would argue that Alt-I or Ctrl-I or even Alt-Shift-I is rarely pressed
accidentally).
34. The most useful keyboard combination in my experience is Alt-
Shift-E (or browser/OS dependent variants of Alt-Shift) to edit a word
in a new tab when encountering a mistake or a bad definition or a miss-
ing alternative definition while learning. Actually, i would recommend
memrise to either pause the learning timer when the new tab is opened
or just open the new tab in the background (in order to edit all the
open words after the learning session). For now, the fancy combina-
tion Alt-Shift-E immediately followed by Ctrl-Shift-Tab should be a
treat for keyboard purists.
Formatting mems and forum posts
35. Bold and italic type can be entered by {curly brackets} and
[square brackets], respectively. The brackets do not work when you
write on mem pictures (in white letters on black background).
36. Multiple pictures in one mem are possible when you use the
img:URL trick instead of the upload picture button in the mem. This
feature is useful if you add a longer text to a picture and want to
format the text to look prettier and easier to read.
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9. 37. Adding empty lines seems to be impossible in pure text mems.
After all, you can start a new paragraph in the mem when adding an
empty line in the mem editor. But you can add a horizontal line in
a mem or a forum post with three underscores or three stars ***.
38. Headings are created with three hyphens – underneath a line, minor
headings with three equal signs =. Font size can be scaled by numer-
ical signs # at the beginning of a line. Four signs create the largest
font, three and two signs yield a smaller size (still larger than the main
text) and one sign creates a medium sized bold typed format similar
to the minor headings.
39. HTML entities have to be used to create explicit numerical signs,
curly brackets, less than signs, etc.
40. Enumerations are formatted automatically when the format is ”1.
text” and there should be no empty line between the items. All fur-
ther enumeration formats involving letters or Roman numbers are not
automatically formatted and can be used as subitems. Hyphens at
the beginning of a line create bullet points with similar rules as the
enumerations.
Issues recently added to this document
41. Citing forum threads is a little bit hidden since clicking on the
caption shows the thread without opening a new page. You have
to click on the date information (“3 weeks, 5 days ago”) in order to
separately open the thread page containing a citable URL.
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