Thursday, February 28, 2019

How to transfer decks from Memrise to Memorion via MemriseUtilities

I heard from a Memrise user about the soon move of user-generated content from Memrise to Decks, without access to an app and so far unknown functionality.

Memorion offers similar games than Memrise and is a full-fledged flashcard management system based around a spaced-repetition algorithm, with tons of edit and configuration possibilities.

In this post I will explain how to move content from Memrise to Memorion via MemriseUtilities. 

This route is rather easy, but it will transfer only the card texts, not the learning progress. It will also not transfer sound files, but Memorion is very good at using the Text-To-Speech engine of the device (if sound files are available, they can also be used).
I will write another blog entry using Memrise2Anki-Extension that should transfer the learning progress as well (as far as it is compatible).


  1. go to MemriseUtilities and install the script engine Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey. Another click installs the MemriseUtilities script.
      
  2. now you can go to the Deck you want to transfer and click on Word List, as explained MemriseUtilities website in 1).
      
  3. Mark all the text in the Course Word List as TSV and copy it to the clipboard (e.g. with Ctrl-C).

      
  4. Open an Editor, e.g. Notepad and paste the words with Ctrl-V.

      
  5. Repeat steps 2-4 until all decks are transferred into one large Editor text.
      
  6. Now save this text, e.g. as Memrise.txt.
    Important: is has to be done with the encoding 'UTF-8', otherwise non-ASCII characters will have problems. In Notepad  this can be changes next to the Save button in the Save dialog.

      
  7. Email this file to your Android device.
      
  8. On your device open the email and View the attachment. Memorion will open automatically and allows you to import. Make sure that the 'Last field per line is (sub)stack name' checkbox is checked. Otherwise your cards are not distributed into the respective substacks.

      
  9. Now you have transferred all the cards. The will be in the stack 'Memrise'.

      
  10. The next step is to configure the imported stacks. For this select a stack and click Configure (bottom right on above figure). You can configure the languages of the text fields, asking direction, appearance of the card, the way cards are asked for and much more. In Expert configurator you have more possibilities. For more details look at the extensive help system of Memorion.

    Keep in mind that most properties will be inherited to stacks below, so you don't have to configure each stack. Also in Expert mode, you can also select multiple stacks at once and configure them together.