REVIEWS / LANGUAGE LEARNING / OWNER INSIGHTS
🦉 WE READ 83 OWNER COMMENTS
Memrise Pro: what owners actually say
Owners love the native-speaker videos and retention, but the removal of community courses has driven loyal paying users away
What owners complain about
- Community courses removed from app COMMON
Multiple users report that the ability to upload and study custom vocabulary lists was shifted to a separate web platform and is being phased out entirely by end of 2024. One lifetime subscriber quit the app over this and several others cite it as their reason for leaving.
- Loss of structured learning path SOME
After a redesign, Memrise switched from Scenarios (under 20 items per lesson) to Wordlists (100-200 items). Users report the new format feels unstructured and they can't figure out lesson progression, even after multiple attempts to re-engage with the app.
- Increasingly locking content behind paywall FEW
Users note that more than half the lessons are now planned to be locked behind premium, where previously the free version had enough content that there was little incentive to upgrade.
- Free version becomes repetitive SOME
Users report that daily tasks in the free version are identical each day, and people get bored after a couple of weeks, reverting to traditional learning methods.
- Microphone timing issues FEW
The speech recognition microphone cuts off too quickly for beginners who need time to construct sentences, requiring restarts up to 6 times to complete a single prompt.
What owners love
- Native-speaker video dialogues
Users highly value the video clips showing real people speaking the target language in context, calling them 'priceless' and a key differentiator from competitors like Duolingo.
- Better vocabulary retention than Duolingo
Multiple users who switched from Duolingo report retaining significantly more words with Memrise and being able to start interacting with native speakers sooner.
- Strong for specific languages
Users report positive experiences learning Japanese, Korean, Russian, Chinese, and French, with particular praise for the structured courses in these languages.
- Clean, intuitive UX
The user interface is repeatedly praised as fantastic and easy to use, with a gameified style that keeps learners engaged.
Surprising patterns
- Lifetime subscribers who bought specifically to support community-created courses now feel betrayed, and some have migrated to Anki despite finding it inferior — they left on principle, not because they found a better tool.
- A feature some users consider a bug — the microphone registering a double-click — is actually welcomed by beginners who struggle to form sentences within the time limit, giving them extra attempts.
- A Memrise staff member is actively responding to Reddit complaints, offering to manually switch users to a different app experience via direct email, suggesting the product is in a fragmented transitional state.
WHO SHOULD SKIP IT
Buyers who want to create or study custom vocabulary lists should avoid Memrise Pro, as community courses are being deprecated and moved to a separate platform scheduled for shutdown by end of 2024.
Synthesised from 83 real owner comments across 4 platforms. Every point is grounded in the comments — no marketing, no AI guessing. How we do it →