Memrise Community Course Downloader v9.3

This Google Chrome extension downloads word lists from Memrise community courses as ".csv" spreadsheets along with all associated images, audio, and video files, alternative answers and study progress. Courses can be downloaded in batch. The format of the saved data is suitable for subsequent import into Anki.

The extension does not download the words you have marked as "ignored" on Memrise (as they are not exposed to fetch requests by the site). You might want to unignore them before downloading or make a separate fresh Memrise account if the learning progress data is not required.

Downloading the Extension

At the top of this page, click the green Code button and then Download ZIP:

Installation

1. Download the CourseDump2022-main.zip archive and extract CourseDump2022-main folder from it. At this step, you can move the extension folder to any place in your filesystem.
2. In Google Chrome click the Extensions button

and then

_{(alternatively, go to the Main menu}

in the top right corner and click Extensions → Manage Extensions) 3. Enable Developer mode (top right corner of the page)

1. Choose Load unpacked (top left corner) and select the CourseDump2022-main folder extracted in step 1
2. (optional) Click the Extensions button from step 2 again and pin the extension to the toolbar by clicking the pin button

💡 Downloading a Memrise Community Course

---

1. Make sure you are logged in to the Memrise community courses domain
2. Navigate to any page belonging to a course you want to download (example-1, example-2)
3. 🚩 If you are downloading a course with a lot of media files 🚩, make sure you have disabled the option Ask where to save each file before downloading in the Chrome settings (chrome://settings/downloads)

4. Press the extension icon and then click the "Download current course" button at the top of the menu

   

_{(if you don't see the extension icon on the toolbar, click the Extensions button}

to locate it)

5. * A download can be interrupted at any point by pressing the Stop ongoing download, which will be displayed in place of the Download current course button whenever there is a download in progress. Keep in mind that restarting a download will begin the whole process from scratch.

When a download starts, you should see a progress bar at the top of the course page, indicating the progress of scanning the course contents with the ratio of the scanned levels to the total number of course levels in the top-right corner:

The scanning will be followed by downloading all associated files (the ".csv" file containing table data of the course, along with the course metadata and media files if you choose to download them). The progress is indicated by a yellow bar with the ratio on the right showing the number of downloaded files to the total number of files in the queue:

After the download is complete, you should see the progress bar turning green:

The downloaded files should appear in your Chrome downloads directory, in a subfolder with the name comprised of the id, name, and author of that course:

Checking download results

For convenience, the names of the downloaded ".csv" file and the "..._media" folder have the counts for the total number of the downloaded items (words) and the number of the referenced media files appended at the end in brackets.

If the number in the spreadsheet filename appears without any additional indicators, e.g., "..._(123).csv", you can be sure that all items (not counting the ignored ones) from a course have been saved successfully. If the total number of the downloaded items does not match the count displayed on the Memrise page, both will be shown to indicate an incomplete download, e.g., "..._(42 of 58).csv". In this instance, it is worth checking the internet connection and repeating the download.

Unfortunately, Memrise displays the expected number on a course page only if the course has been started by the user or the course isn't split into levels. If this is not the case, the figure displayed in the ".csv" filename will be based on the total number of items in the levels the extension managed to scrape and prefixed with a tilde to indicate an estimation, e.g., "..._(~77).csv". To verify that all items have been downloaded, you’ll need to compare this number to an independent evaluation (the easiest way would still be to enroll in the course by pressing the "Get started now" button, answering a couple of questions to activate the word count, and checking the main course page again to see the value displayed by Memrise).

For the media files, it is enough to compare the number at the end of the "..._media" folder's name with the actual number of the files it contains. If the two do not match, some files are likely to be missing due to connection issues (either on your side or on the side of the Memrise server). In most cases, simply retrying the download can fix the problem. You should not delete files from failed attempts – the extension will keep putting the files into the same media folder, resolving potential naming conflicts, so that even on unreliable networks, several partially successful attempts can yield fully recovered course media data.

^{In some rare cases, however, Memrise courses might contain references to files that don't exist. Attempting to download a course with a broken link will result in the progress bar turning red during the download, and the respective error appearing on the "Manage extensions" page.}

Batch download

If you have multiple courses to download, instead of going through them one by one, it is more convenient to add all courses to a queue by pressing the respective button in the "Batch download" section of the extension menu on each respective course page:

and then download the whole queue at once by clicking the "Download all" button (the numeral in brackets indicates the total number of currently queued courses):

^{Note that the download should still be initiated from (any) page of the Memrise community-course domain, since the extension needs an active Memrise login to access the data.}

During the scanning phase of a batch download, the progress for each course is displayed on a separate progress bar, marked by a course name, with the overall scanning progress showing on a separate bar at the bottom:

The file download phase proceeds from there as usual. Files from all the courses in the batch are processed as one combined stack.

If you have a list of courses in a text file somewhere (from one of the previous versions of the extension, for example), it can be imported with the "Import course list" menu button:

The extension will accept practically any url format (with the lines, not recognized as valid course urls being treated as text comments).

examples

``` https://community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/234546/breaking-into-japanese-literature/ https://community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/1098515/german-4 https://community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/1136018/ a plain-text comment https://community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/1098188 community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/1891054/japanese-5/ https://community-courses.memrise.com/aprender/learn?course_id=5591215?recommendation_id=5144c220-f6cb-42d1-a677-ef922e3ddcb6 https://community-courses.memrise.com/aprender/review?category_id=963 community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/1136234/russisch-3

community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/1136236 https://community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/43290/advanced-english-for-native-speakers/2/ community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/867/ ```

The only requirement is that each course url must be placed on a separate line and point to an existing course page. The latter might not be the case if, for example, your link was saved before Memrise moved the community courses (you can try updating community course urls by autoreplacing "app." domains in your list with "community-courses."). Note that duplicate courses are removed from the queue, which might result in the number of courses in the queue after import being less than the number of entries in the source text file. The list of currently queued courses can be displayed by pressing the "View queued courses" button (opens in a new tab):

This can also be used for editing the list by copy-pasting it to a text editor, making the necessary changes, and then re-importing the result as a text file through the process described above.

💡 Importing into Anki

tl;dr (most basic import): 1. Make a note type: 1. Open the downloaded ".csv" file → look at the number and names of the columns 2. In Anki press Tools (top left menu) → Manage Note Types → Add → Add: Basic → put in a name (e.g. "Memrise - Japanese") → OK → Fields → add new/rename existing ones to match the columns from the ".csv" file ("Level tags" column excluded) → Save → close the window 2. Make a deck: press Create Deck (bottom center of the main Anki screen) → put in the course's name → OK 3. Import the spreadsheet: `File