Memrise Alternatives for German: Where to Go for Real Spaced Repetition

For years, Memrise was the easy answer for German vocabulary. You picked a course someone had built - the Goethe B1 list, the vocabulary of your textbook, 5,000 words by frequency - and the app watered your "plants" at growing intervals. It was spaced repetition with a friendly face, and thousands of German courses existed because users made them.

That product has changed. Memrise now centres on its own official courses, short videos of native speakers and an AI conversation partner, and the user-made courses were moved out of the main apps to a separate website. If you learned with a community course and opened the app one day to find it gone from the place you knew, you are not alone, and you did not imagine it.

This guide is for the people who used Memrise as a scheduler. What you need depends on what exactly you miss.

What Memrise is good at today

It is fair to start here, because the current product is not bad; it is different.

• Hearing real people. The video clips of native speakers saying a phrase, in different voices and speeds, are still the best thing about it. For a beginner's ear that is worth a lot.
• A soft start. The first weeks feel light and encouraging.
• Speaking practice without an audience. The chat partner lets you try sentences without anyone listening.

If that is what you want at A1, staying is a reasonable choice.

What people miss

Going by what learners write when they look for a replacement, it is four things.

1. A course that matches their book or exam. Someone had already typed in Menschen A2 or the telc B1 list. 2. Transparent scheduling. You could see that a word was due in six days. 3. Typing the answer. Not tapping one of four tiles. 4. Range. Courses up to C1 and for narrow topics, not only a beginner path.

No single app replaces all four in the same way. Here is where each one lives now.

The alternatives at a glance

Anki: closest to the old Memrise in spirit

If what you miss is "any course I can imagine, made by other learners", Anki is where that culture went. AnkiWeb has shared German decks for the Goethe lists, for frequency lists and for most major coursebooks. The scheduling is stronger than Memrise's ever was, and everything is visible: you can see each card's interval and history.

The costs are well known. The interface is plain, the settings take an evening to understand, and deck quality ranges from excellent to full of errors. Run the check in how to pick an Anki deck for German before you commit, and use these settings.

Best for: people who liked choosing and customising courses, and who do not mind a tool that looks like a tool.

merke.me: if you want the course built for you

merke.me is ours, so weigh this accordingly. It suits the Memrise user who liked the idea - ready-made German on a schedule - and wanted more depth and more rigour.

• Ready content from A1 to C2. The 10,000 most frequent words in ten bands, the Goethe exam lists, everyday spoken vocabulary, over 1,000 collocations, about 480 grammar points. You switch on decks; you do not hunt for courses.
• A schedule you can see. Eight steps from 4 hours to 4 months, the same for every entry. Each review tells you the step the entry reached and when it returns. After the last step the entry is mastered and leaves the queue.
• Typing if you want it, with three levels of strictness, or reveal-and-rate when you are on a phone.
• Audio on every word and every example sentence, in a male or a female standard-German voice.
• Grammar in the same queue. This is the part Memrise never had. A grammar point is taught, then reviewed as sentences with a gap.

It does not have user-made courses or video clips, and that is on purpose: one consistent, checked course instead of a library of uneven ones. 100 words and 30 grammar points from any level are free with no time limit.

Best for: learners who want to open the app, do what is due, and trust the content.

Clozemaster: if you miss the volume

Clozemaster describes itself as the step between beginner apps and fluency. It serves German sentences with one word missing, in frequency order, tens of thousands of them, and reschedules each sentence at growing intervals. There are no lessons. It assumes you know the basics and want exposure.

Best for: B1 and above, as a second tool. Not a place to start German.

Lingvist: if you only want vocabulary, fast

Lingvist teaches the most frequent German words through typed gap sentences and adapts quickly to what you know. It is polished and narrow: words, with light grammar hints.

Best for: learners with a base who want vocabulary growth and nothing else.

Quizlet: if you need your textbook list by Friday

Quizlet has the largest library of user-made sets, including most German school and university lists. It is built around learning a set for a date, not around keeping it for years. For "chapter 7 by Friday" it is the quickest route. For long-term German it is the weakest in this list; the difference is explained in Quizlet or Anki for German.

Moving your progress

Nobody wants to re-learn 1,500 words they already know. Two practical points.

• Keep a list. If you can still reach your old course, copy the word list into a spreadsheet: German in one column, English in the other. That file opens almost every door. Anki imports it directly as text.
• Skip what you know. In Anki, suspend known cards in the browser in bulk. In merke.me, a placement test puts you at your level, a word check lets you tick off the words you do not know from a list, and each lesson has an "I know this" button. The aim in both tools is the same: spend reviews only on words you would otherwise lose.

Expect one honest side effect. When you start typing answers after years of tapping tiles, you will find that a share of the words you "knew" you can only recognise. That is not lost progress. It is the first accurate measurement you have had.

How to choose

• You liked building and choosing courses: Anki.
• You liked having it done for you and want it to go to C2 with grammar: merke.me.
• You are past the basics and want sentences: Clozemaster next to one of the above.
• You have a list and a deadline: Quizlet.
• You like Memrise as it is now: stay, and add a real scheduler for vocabulary once you pass A2.

A wider view, including Duolingo, Babbel and Busuu, is in the best spaced repetition apps for German and the best apps to learn German.

Whichever you pick, pick one. Running two review queues to "compare" for a month is how the daily load doubles and both get abandoned. If you want to see what ours looks like before deciding, the vocabulary, grammar library and collocations are open to read, and prices are on the pricing page.