How Memrise Helps You Remember Words and Alphabets

How do you find memory aids for languages and alphabets in foreign languages and add your own?

Today Memrise sent me an email reminding me of the five Japanese words I learned yesterday. What a great idea. I am starting to warm to their website.

Yes, I do realise that they give you a beginner's course, then try to sell you their advanced course once you are hooked. It's brilliant that they get you started, all for free.

Memory Aids
One thing I really liked yesterday was the memory aid system. It took me an hour or so before I realised what was going on in the memory aid box at the lower half of the page. I didn't see any guide on how to use the system.

My MacBook screen is horizontal and I kept losing the lower half of the screen. I could see the memory aid somebody else had put in a box at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes it was useful. For example, such as the suggestion that square looking like a mouth was the letter M in Korean, which I mentioned in yesterday's blog post.

I initially thought there was just one memory aid, put there by whoever runs the site, or the officially approved contributors. On Duolingo you have to apply to help develop the next site which is in Beta (testing with guinea pig users, still under development). You must be bilingual and send them a text and translation to prove it. Comments and suggestions and corrections from people who are not yet approved or who have not applied appear on the forum sites.

However, in ' M e m r i s e'  (oops - spell checker is still turning it into memories), the person's name and photo appeared alongside their memory aid comment. Later a box popped up asking me if I wanted to record a memory aid. Mostly I didn't.

Then I tried recording my memory aid. My memory aid was a four letter word! I am glad I put in the dots. You have to be so careful on the internet. I don't want anything unsuitable upsetting any past, present or future potential pupils or their parents, or adults, nor to have to explain rude words to pupils, nor to be associated with anything inelegant.

Up pops my name and picture. Oh, I thought, this is just private, personal, like those messages which say Welcome Back and your name, they are just reminding me of my own comment.

Then I went back to check that page later. Oops. Up pops somebody else's comment, with their name and picture. I start clicking on every arrow and link on the page. The right arrow takes me on to other memory aids.  Mine was last. Click on the left arrow and I am back to somebody else's suggestion. Now I wonder if they can see mine. I'm pretty sure they can. So that's how the system works. Everybody using the site adds memory aids. What a great idea. A continually growing resource. This is a revolution in language learning.

I am glad I got in early. Maybe it's at the early stages. Maybe they will change it, or be bought out. Eventually you will have to pay. Or get annoying advertisements popping up everywhere. Or maybe useful advertisements for things I want, other websites, dictionaries, teachers, forums.

Meanwhile I am delighted to have not one but two websites teaching me languages. I am crossing the big barriers - learning the letters for Russian, Greek, Hebrew. I shall then move onto the more difficult ones, Korean (supposed too be easy), Arabic (which may be similar to Hebrew?).

I also hope one day to learn the Tamil writing which looks so pretty on signs in buses and trains Singapore. It has circles and loops and lines above or below neatly linking syllables or whole words or phrases - one day I shall find out.

Why did it take me so long to find out what was happening in the memory box on the "M e m r i s e" website. I normally don't click on links on language pages.

On Duolingo I discovered that you risk spending ten minutes on an exercise learning five words, click on a link which takes you to a forum page, then have to waste time loading up your exercise page again. Worst of all, you find you are back on page one of the exercises. Although you go through it faster now that you know the words, and its good revision, it seems a frustrating and distracting time waste.

To sum up, the "M e m r i s e" website, free for beginners, has a useful feature. It stores your own memory aid for later. The list of memory aids grows longer constantly. (Maybe at some stage they will have so many that they will pick the top ten. But you really only need to click on half a dozen, or even two or three, until you find one which works for you. However, if you need to click on all to reach the blank box to record your own, one day they might need to stop or put in a link to jump to a blank box.)

Languages you can start for free from "Memrise":

•  English, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh, Zulu
• Seller: Memrise
•  
• The Duolingo site has Greek and Hebrew in preparation and I am down on their waiting list to be emailed when these courses start, probably around September 2016.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, English teacher and language teacher.
Please forward this to anybody who might find it useful. I have several more posts on languages in this blog and other blogs on English spelling and grammar. You can also write to me with suggestions, requests and comments. I teach individuals and workshops in the UK and Singapore in person and worldwide on Skype.